Cathodoluminescence is emission of photons by electrons impacting on a luminescent material.
The Rutherford scattering experiments detected impacting helium nuclei on a phosphor screen.
Many other kinds of luminescence are also known.
Is a similar phenomena known for neutral atoms/molecules impacting a luminescent surface? If no, then what may be the reason for it?
I can't think of any physical reason why it is impossible, but I don't know of any examples of it and there are good reasons why macroscopic emission of light from a material that has particles striking it is usually going to involve charged collisions. For a material to emit light, it's electrons must be in an excited state that they can drop down from to release photons. Electrons are going to be most easily excited by other charged particles, or light itself, because electrons are charged. But any means of giving the electrons in a material enough energy to be excited should be able to produce light, or even simply giving the electrons the means to jump to a lower energy state than they are already in. So- possible sure, doesn't violate the laws of physics, and there are forms of luminescence that don't involve a stream of charged particles striking something (sonoluminescence, piezo-luminescence, fractoluminescence), so it's likely that luminescence should be possible from a stream of neutral particles striking a material, I just have never seen a confirmed example of this happening.
You decide if the following is relevant.
J. Chem. Phys. 50, 4758–4765 (1969)
Abstract
The chemisorption of each of the gases oxygen, nitric oxide, and carbon monoxide on a clean, polycrystalline tungsten ribbon is accompanied by a faint luminescence in the visible. This effect is not observed during the chemisorptions of carbon dioxide, hydrogen bromide, hydrogen, or nitrogen. The effect, when it does occur, is a small one, corresponding to photon emission for one out of every $10^9$ CO or NO adsorptions and one out of every $10^7$ O2 adsorptions. The decay of this self‐excited luminescence does not follow first‐order kinetics; it persists for many seconds with hyperbolic time dependence. No luminescent behavior is observed during electrochemical adsorption and desorption of oxygen.
