Kinetic Model for the Statistical Distribution of Atomic Clusters

Varied neutral and ionic clusters can be produced from laser ablation of available samples. It is found from the recorded mass spectra that the size-distribution of cluster ions with similar structure can be described by a distribution function. In this paper,cluster ions observed in the experiments are considered to be generated from the ion-molecular reactions in laser plasma. Kinetic equations were built to describe the productions of neutral and charged clusters seperately. The size-distributions from numerical solution of the equations are presented and are shown to agree very well with what observed in the experiments.