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Laboratory Studies Of Gas-Grain Processes On Cosmic Dust Analogues, Jiao He

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The formation of molecules in the interstellar medium (ISM) takes place both in the gas phase and on surfaces of cosmic dust grains. Gas phase reactions alone are found to be insufficient to account for the observed abundance of molecules such as molecular hydrogen, water, carbon dioxide, methanol as well as many other complex molecules; grain surfaces must be involved as catalysts to explain their formation. In this thesis we study the physical and chemical processes on surfaces of cosmic dust grain analogues in simulated ISM environments. Oxygen is the third most abundant element in the universe and is present …