The production of O(1S) from dissociative recombination of O2+

Abstract

The suggestion that the dissociative recombination (DR) of O2+ with an electron could be an important process in the Earth's upper atmosphere first appeared in the literature over 55 years ago1. In 1947, Bates and Massey2 pointed out that DR of O2+ was the only process that could explain the observed electron recombination rates in the E and F1 regions of the ionosphere. In 1954, Nicolet3 proposed that DR of O2+ was the source of the ionospheric emission at 5,577 A in the Earth's airglow. In the intervening years, the DR of O2+ leading to O in the excited 1S state has been the subject of several reviews and many papers4,5 and has been termed the 'classical'6 ionospheric source of the well-known green line emission. Nevertheless, the rate coefficient for DR leading to O(1S) has never been reliably determined in the laboratory. Here, we report the first theoretical calculations of the rate coefficient for a wide range of temperatures.