FIRSOV APPROACH TO CHEMICAL-BOND EFFECTS ON THE LOW-ENERGY ELECTRONICSTOPPING POWER OF HEAVY-IONS

A recently derived modified version of the Firsov model to account for the low-energy electronic stopping cross section of protons due to mo lecular targets is extended here for the case of heavy projectiles. Th e method is free of adjustable parameters and is applied to projectile s with 2 less-than-or-equal-to Z less-than-or-equal-to 18 incident on a wide class of hydrocarbon materials and other simpler molecules. A f air overall agreement is observed with available experimental data for He and Li projectiles. The use of characteristic molecular groups as well as the core and bond (CAB) formalism for stopping power studies o f heavy ions in compound materials is strongly supported by the result s of this work.