Inelastic energy losses in the collisions of 0+ and O2+ ions with neutral molecules have been studied in a beam apparatus designed to direct mass-analyzed low-energy ion beams onto target molecules and scan the energy, mass, and angular distributions of charged reaction products. Maxima in the scattered ion intensities are observed in the 0+--02 and 02+-Ar systems which are energetically displaced from the centroids of elastically scattered ions by amounts corresponding to known vibrational energy spacings in the respective diatomic species. Vibrational transition probabilities obtained from the inelastic energy loss data show multiquantum transitions to be more important as the reactant ion kinetic energy is increased from 10 to 20 eV. For a given reactant ion kinetic energy, higher vibrational transitions predominate at larger scattering angles. The velocity dependences of these transitions are in reasonable accord with calculations that employ a semiclassical impact parameter treatment to estimate collisional energy transfer and time-dependent wavefunctions to evaluate vibrational transition probabilities for a forced harmonic oscillator model. This article is copyrighted as indicated in the article. Reuse of AIP content is subject to the terms at: http://scitation.aip.org/termsconditions. Downloaded to IP: 129.105.215.146 On: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 23:17:45