Preface

Summary

This research monograph provides a single-volume description of the dissociative recombination of molecular ions with electrons. Since this is one of the most complex gas-phase processes, its study is a challenge to theorists and experimentalists alike. The theory, experiment, and applications of dissociative recombination are scattered in the scientific literature as original research articles, conference proceedings, and review articles. This book brings this information together in a single work for the first time.

The book is intended for researchers and Ph. D. students in the fields of atomic and molecular physics, chemical physics and physical chemistry, molecular astrophysics, atmospheric physics, and other areas of science where electrons and molecular ions are important.

This book was written during a period when each of us had several other commitments which slowed down the writing. One of us (AEO) was department chair at UC Davis essentially during the entire writing process, and ML chaired committees for the Swedish Space Board and the Swedish Research Council.

We are grateful for the hospitality of the Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics (ITAMP) at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Harvard University Physics Department (Kate Kirby, Hussein Sadeghpour), the Cluster Research Laboratory, Toyota Technological Institute, Tokyo (Tamotsu Kondow), and the University of Chicago (Takeshi Oka), all of which provided excellent working conditions for us when we needed to get away from our home institutions to focus on writing.