Toward a frame-work for calculating comprehensive electron collision data sets for low-temperature plasma modeling*

Modeling low-temperature non-equilibrium plasmas with particle-in-cell Monte Carlo and Boltzmann solver codes requires comprehensive sets of collision cross sections. However, these data sets are particularly difficult to calculate for low-temperature plasmas, where near-neutral atoms and molecules, and excited-state species are abundant. As a result, while some data reside in specialized databases, in general, comprehensive sets of cross sections do not exist in the literature.

 

Recently we have developed a universal frame-work for quickly calculating electron-impact excitation and ionization cross sections of ground and excited state species of atoms, molecules and ions. Here we apply the approach to a range of air diatomic molecule species (such as N₂ and O₂), and present comparisons of the new results with benchmark theory and experiment in order to quantify the uncertainties.