The mechanism of negative and positive hydrogen ions production on the Ni surface

Abstract

The studies about surface production of hydrogen negative ions play an important role in many technologies. In the present paper, a low energy molecular hydrogen ion beam was irradiated to the porous Ni sheet. It was found that negative atomic hydrogen ions were detected at the back of the porous Ni sheet when the energy of incident ion beam was lower than 180 eV. When the energy of the incident ions increased, the positive ions dominated at the back of the porous Ni sheet. The production of negative hydrogen on Ni surface can't be explained by comparing the electron affinity of Ni and H. The charge transferring during the process of H atoms reflected from Ni surface was calculated by using constrained DFT (cDFT). The results show the production of negative hydrogen on Ni surface may well be due to heterogeneous electron density on the Ni surface. However, the influence of incident energy on the production of negative and positive hydrogen ions is unable to be explained by cDFT. The problem may be solved by using TDDFT which is able to capture the transfer of energy to electrons during the collision between atoms.