Molecular dynamics simulation of energy exchanges during hydrogen collision with graphite sheets

Experiments show that the energy of particles incident on divertor plates in fusion devices seldom exceeds 100 eV. Trim code and its variants are not suitable to predict the sputtering yield of carbon-based divertor plates for this energy range and, therefore, a dynamic model, taking into account the C-H bond formation and breaking, and the structure of carbon, is needed. In this paper, the molecular dynamics method is employed to investigate collision processes between incident hydrogen atoms and a graphene sheet. The simulation results demonstrate that the collision processes cannot be adequately described by a simple binary approximation. The energy transfer from the projectile to the graphite sheet exhibits a very complicated behavior when the kinetic energy of the incident hydrogen atom is below 30 eV, strongly depending on the impact position. When its kinetic energy is lower than 0.35 eV, the incident hydrogen is always reflected back from the single, perfect graphite sheet; when its kinetic energy is higher than 0.35 eV, then whether the incident particle penetrates the graphite sheet, is reflected back or is adsorbed depends on the impact position. In certain areas of the graphite sheet, either adsorption or reflection of an incident hydrogen atom can occur in two different energy ranges. (C) 2010 American Institute of Physics. [doi: 10.1063/1.3428447]