Investigation on the energy loss in low energy protons interacting with hydrogen plasma

Energy loss of protons with energy 100 keV penetrating the partially ionized hydrogen plasma target was measured. The plasma target was created by electric discharge in the hydrogen gas, the state of the plasma target was diagnosed by using the laser interferometry method: the free electron density is up to 10¹⁶ cm^-3, temperature is about 1-2 eV, and the plasma target may exist at the microsecond level. It is found that the energy loss of protons is closely related to the free electron density, and the energy loss data enable us to infer the value of the Coulomb logarithm (10.8) for the stopping power of the free electrons. This agrees well with the theoretical prediction which is 4.3 times higher than that given by the Bethe formula for neutral hydrogen, which is a little bigger than Hoffmann's result but much smaller than Jacoby's result. Comparing our result with Hoffmann's, the energy we used is only 100 keV, much lower than 1.4 MeV/u, and the low-energy regime we applied could be the cause of the increase in the enhancement factor. However, in the comparison between our result and the Jacoby's, the effective charge for protons is almost constant, unlike the Kr⁺ impact in which the enhanced ion charge state induces the giant enhancement factor. Compared to the gas target, the energy loss enhancement factor in plasma target is 2.9.