Basic features of correlated ion stopping in plasmas

Abstract

We reconsider correlated ion stopping in plasmas with the aim to emphasize the basic features and their underlying physics. For a better understanding of the effects connected with correlated ion stopping, it is useful to distinguish two types of correlated ion stopping, characterized by a small or large ratio of the correlation length of the ions to the screening length in the plasma. These two types of correlated ion stopping are of rather different character. We describe and explain these differences and give some generic examples of ion structures and ion clusters to demonstrate the basic features of both types of correlated stopping. This shows that only the short-range correlations always yield an enhanced stopping, whereas the long-range correlations, in general, reduce the stopping compared to single, individual ions. We mainly consider classical plasmas; the basic features, however, remain unchanged for a jellium target as well as for a plasma at any degeneracy.