Dissociative recombination is the dominant neutralizing process in any plasma cold enough to contain a molecular component. During the last decade ion storage rings with electron coolers have proved to be very powerful tools for the study of dissociative recombination [1,2]. The storage ring technique benefit from the advantages of using merged beams, namely access to collisions at very low interaction energies, where the cross section for recombination is large, and the ability to conveniently and accurately control the interaction energy over a wide energy range (many orders of magnitude). To this list, as compared with single-pass merged-beam techniques, the storage rings provides high luminosity, low background, ability of electronic and vibrational cooling, high detection efficiency, and the possibility to measure angular distributions.
Dissociative recombination is an important process in interstellar molecular clouds, planetary atmospheres, fusions devices and other man-made plasmas. In the Molecular Physics group in Stockholm, in collaboration with several Swedish and foreign research groups, we have addressed problems in all the mentioned categories of applications. One important aspect of dissociative recombination the product branching ratios for polyatomic ions. There have been so many experiments at the storage ring CRYRING (Manne Siegbahn Laboratory, Stockholm University) during the last few years, so that a recent review is missing many of them [3].
The talk will include examples of recent work relevant to the areas mentioned above.

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