Molecular effects in beam-foil spectroscopy

Abstract
The character of the ionic beam downstream from the foil in a beam-foil experiment depends on whether the incident particle entering the foil is atomic or molecular. In this paper it is demonstrated how incident molecules affect charge-state distributions, beam-particle scattering, charge exchange, excitation functions, mean lives and transition probabilities, alignment, and linear straggling after the foil. The possibility of exploiting certain molecular effects for further study is also discussed.