Heavy-ion beams to diagnose traces of heavy-element impurities in a hydrogen plasma discharge

Summary  Charge exchange of chlorine ions traversing a discharge plasma target is used as a probe to determine the rati of heavy impurities inside a plasma column. The rate coefficient of the recombination process is strongly related to the atomic number of the target atoms. High-Z impurities are much more efficient to modify the charge state distribution of the incoming chlorine ions. The ragne of detection could reach about 1‰ of the total number of atoms.