Desorption of water adsorbed on iron oxide by laser irradiation

Overview of research and development activities on fusion nuclear technologies in Japan

“…In the tritium decontamination study, the mechanism of water desorption from iron oxide using laser irradiation is studied at The University of Tokyo [41]. It indicates that the water desorption mechanism consists of two processes, namely thermal process and photostimulated desorption (PSD) process.…”

Thermal and Radiation Processing of Porous Extraterrestrial Water Ice

“…Wolf et al noted that, since water and ice are transparent to 6.4 eV photons, the desorption process must involve the absorption of the photon by the substrate, which they estimate to have a probability of a few percent. The transient negative ion (TNI) mechanism, one of the most popular in PSD (Menzel 2012, Gadzuk 2012, is of rather general applicability, and has been applied not only to metals but also to iron oxide (Chiba et al 2004). This is the mechanism proposed by Wolf et al (1991); it starts with the ejection of a photoelectron from the substrate and its capture in a negative H 2 Oion, which is attracted by its image charge to the surface.…”