CALCULATION OF INELASTIC ELECTRON-ATOM AND ELECTRON-MOLECULE COLLISION CROSS SECTIONS BY CLASSICAL METHODS

摘要

We have used Thomson's, Gryzinski's and Ochkur's classical methods for energy transfer in electronic collisions together with the quantum mechanical Franck-Condon factor for the overlap of nuclear wave functions to compute inelastic electron-molecule collision cross sections. Specific application is to ionization and to direct and exchange electronic excitation. After first extending previous appli¬cations of the classical energy-transfer methods to atoms, we make calculations for a number of processes involving air molecules (N2, N2+, NO, 02, also CO). The results are applied to the near-threshold domain as well as to the overall behavior of the cross section. Agree¬ment with the very few absolute experimental data available is to within better than a factor of 2-3. This must be regarded as encouraging when one considers that there exist hardly any experimental data on excita¬tion and that quantum mechanical calculations would be prohibitively lengthy to carry out while the present calculations are very simple to perform.