Thesiss

An inquiry into atmospheric escape driven by photoionization. We begin with a brief survey of the relevant historical development of atmospheric escape, spanning from the origins of kinetic theory to the age of exoplanets. Collisional mechanisms justifying the continuum assumpti…

The first measurements of photoionization of Fe3+, Fe 5+, and Fe7+ ions were made using the ion-photon beam endstation on beamline 10.0.1 at the Advanced Light Source, where ion beams from an ECR source were merged with monochromatic beams of synchrotron radiation. The photoion-…

Radiative double electron capture (RDEC) is a one-step process in ion-atom collisions occurring when two target electrons are captured to a bound state of the projectile simultaneously with the emission of a single photon. The emitted photon has approximately double the energy o…