Thermal desorption of astrophysically relevant molecules from forsterite(010)

Abstract

We present temperature programmed desorption (TPD) measurements of CO, CH4, O2 and CO2 from the forsterite(010) surface in the sub-monolayer and multilayer coverage regimes. In the case of CO, CH4 and O2, multilayer growth begins prior to saturation of the monolayer peak, resulting in two clearly distinguishable desorption peaks. On the other hand, a single peak for CO2 is observed which shifts from high temperature at low coverage to low temperature at high coverages, sharpening upon multilayer formation. The leading edges are aligned for all the molecules in the multilayer coverage regime indicating zero order desorption. We have extracted multilayer desorption energies for these molecules using an Arrhenius analysis. For sub-monolayer coverages, we observe an extended desorption tail to higher temperature. Inversion analysis has been used to extract the coverage dependent desorption energies in the sub-monolayer coverage regime, from which we obtain the desorption energy distribution. We found that owing to the presence of multiple adsorption energy sites on the crystalline surface the typical desorption energies of these small molecules are significantly larger than obtained in previous measurements for several other substrates. Therefore molecules bound to crystalline silicate surfaces may remain locked in the solid state for a longer period of time before desorption into the gas phase.