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Master Equation For Hydrogen Recombination On Grain Surfaces, Gianfranco Vidali, Ofer Biham, Itay Furman, Valerio Pirronello

Physics - All Scholarship

Recent experimental results on the formation of molecular hydrogen on astrophysically relevant surfaces under conditions similar to those encountered in the interstellar medium provided useful quantitative information about these processes. Rate equation analysis of experiments on olivine and amorphous carbon surfaces provided the activation energy barriers for the diffusion and desorption processes relevant to hydrogen recombination on these surfaces. However, the suitability of rate equations for the simulation of hydrogen recombination on interstellar grains, where there might be very few atoms on a grain at any given time, has been questioned. To resolve this problem, we introduce a master equation …