Protonated CO2 in massive star-forming clumps
  Interstellar CO2 is an important reservoir of carbon and oxygen, and one of
the major constituents of the icy mantles of dust grains, but it is not
observable directly in the cold gas because has no permanent dipole moment. Its
protonated form, HOCO+, is believed to be a good proxy for gaseous CO2.
However, it has been detected in only a few star-forming regions so far, so
that its interstellar chemistry is not well understood. We present new
detections of HOCO+ lines in 11 high-mass star-forming clumps. Our observations
increase by more than three times the number of detections in star-forming
regions so far. We have derived beam-averaged abundances relative to H2 in
between 0.3 and 3.8 x 10^{-11}. We have compared these values with the
abundances of H13CO+, a possible gas-phase precursor of HOCO+, and CH3OH, a
product of surface chemistry. We have found a positive correlation with H13CO+,
while with CH3OH there is no correlation. We suggest that the gas-phase
formation route starting from HCO+ plays an important role in the formation of
HOCO+, perhaps more relevant than protonation of CO2 (upon evaporation of this
latter from icy dust mantles).
