  The interaction of highly charged ions (HCI) with solids leads to particle
sputtering, which can be used for defect-mediated engineering of the properties
of the material. Ions can store energy in the form of kinetic and potential
energy (sum of the ionization energies) and transfer it to the solid upon
impact. The interaction and sputtering mechanisms depend significantly on the
projectile energies. However, the relevance of various interaction mechanisms
is unknown. Here we show that for slow HCI (5 keV) the interaction mechanisms
leading to particle emission by electronic excitation and transferred kinetic
energy are independent from each other, which is consistent with our atomistic
simulations. We have irradiated substrate supported (Au, SiO$_2$) monolayers of
MoS$_2$ with highly charged xenon ions (charge state: 17$+$ - 40$+$), extracted
the emitted neutral, post-ionized Mo particles into a time-of-flight mass
spectrometer and determined their velocity distributions. We find two main
contributions, one at high velocities and a second one at lower velocities, and
assign them to kinetic and potential effects respectively. Our data suggests
that the dominant mechanism for potential sputtering is related to
electron-phonon coupling, while non-thermal processes play no significant role.
We anticipate that our work will be a starting point for further experiments
and simulations to determine whether the different processes resulting from
E$_{pot}$ and E$_{kin}$ can be separated or whether synergistic effects play a
role.
