Electron-impact ionization cross section of fusion-relevant diatomic molecules containing B

Abstract

Because the dust from beryllium (Be) is toxic to humans, ITER has recently decided to replace the first wall material of Be with tungsten boron (B). While there has been much discussion on the electron-impact ionization (EII) cross sections for Be-containing molecules, EII data is still limited for fusion-relevant molecules containing B. We report the EII cross section for the fusion-relevant diatomic molecules BH, BN, BO, BF₃ and WB using the Binary-Encounter-Bethe (BEB) and Deutsch-Märk (DM) methods and evaluate its accuracy based on the available experimental data. The errors between our BEB and DM cross sections for these molecules are within 23%.