Astrochemical effect of the fundamental grain surface processes I. The diffusion of grain surface species and the pre-exponential factor

Abstract

Abbreviation. Thermal diffusion is one of the basic processes for the mobility and formation of species on cosmic dust grains. Recent laboratory measurements have found that the diffusion pre-exponential factor can differ from that for desorption by several orders of magnitude. We aim to evaluate the effect of the newly experimentally measured diffusion pre-exponential factor on the chemistry under cold molecular cloud conditions. We found that statistically, more than half of the total gas-phase and grain surface species are not affected by the new pre-exponential factor after a chemical evolution of 10$^5$ yr. The most abundant gas-phase CO and grain surface water ice are not affected by the new pre-exponential factor. For the grain surface species that are affected, compared to the commonly adopted value of the pre-exponential factor for diffusion used in the chemical models, they could be either overproduced or underproduced with the lower diffusion pre-factor used in this work. The former case applies to radicals and the species that serve as reactants, while the latter case applies to complex organic molecules (COMs) on the grain and the species that rarely react with other species. Gas-phase species could also be affected due to the desorption of the grain surface species. The abundance of some gas-phase COMs could be varied by over one order of magnitude depending on the adopted grain surface temperature and/or the ratio of diffusion to desorption energy in the model. Key species whose diffusion pre-exponential factor significantly affects the model predictions were also evaluated, and these specie include CH3OH, H2CO, and NO. The results presented in this study show that the pre-exponential factor is one of the basic and important parameters in astrochemical models.