HICS: Highly charged ion collisions with surfaces
Abstract The layout of a new instrument designed to study the interaction of highly charged ions with surfaces, which consists of an ion source, a beamline including charge separation and a target chamber, is presented here. By varying the charge state and impact velocity of the projectiles separately, the dissipation of potential and kinetic energy at or below the surface can be studied independently. The target chamber offers the use of tunable metal–insulator–metal devices as detectors for internal electronic excitation, a time-of-flight system to study the impact induced particle emission and the possibility to transfer samples in situ to an ultra high vacuum (UHV) scanning probe microscope. Samples and detectors can be prepared in situ as well. As a first example data on graphene layers on SrTiO3 which have been irradiated with Xe36+ are presented.
Thermal spike analysis of highly charged ion tracks
Abstract The irradiation of material using swift heavy ion or highly charged ion causes excitation of the electron subsystem at nanometer scale along the ion trajectory. According to the thermal spike model, energy deposited into the electron subsystem leads to temperature increase due to electron–phonon coupling. If ion-induced excitation is sufficiently intensive, then melting of the material can occur, and permanent damage (i.e., ion track) can be formed upon rapid cooling. We present an extension of the analytical thermal spike model of Szenes for the analysis of surface ion track produced after the impact of highly charged ion. By applying the model to existing experimental data, more than 60% of the potential energy of the highly charged ion was shown to be retained in the material during the impact and transformed into the energy of the thermal spike. This value is much higher than 20–40% of the transferred energy into the thermal spike by swift heavy ion. Thresholds for formation of highly charged ion track in different materials show uniform behavior depending only on few material parameters.
The unfolded universe of elementary particles. A geometric explanation of the standard model structure
We propose a geometric explanation of the standard model of Glashow, Weinberg and Salam for the known elementary particles. Our model is a generic Quantum Field Theory in dimension four, obtained by developing along a Lorentz sub-manifold the lagrangian of Einstein and Dirac in dimension twelve. The main mechanism which gives birth to the standard model is a certain gauge fixing of triality, which permits to identify the multiplicity of fermions, as seen from the four dimensional world, with the eight unseen dimensions of the generating universe. In this way we get the known tables of particles, explaining the series of fermions and the gauge bosons. We suggest that the Higgs field dynamics could appear through a bosonization of the right handed neutrino and correspond to a displacement in the unseen dimensions. We also propose hypotheses for dark matter, and perhaps dark energy. Then we suggest predictions to go beyond the standard model.