Excited ions heavy particle transfer

Excited states can be formed by a variety of processes, of which the important ones are photolysis (light absorption), impact of electrons or heavy particles (radiolysis), and, especially in the condensed phase, ion neutralization. To these may be added processes such as energy transfer, dissociation from super-excited and ionized states, thermal processes, and chemical reaction. Following Brocklehurst [14], it is instructive to consider some of the direct processes giving excited states and their respective inverses. Thus luminescence is the inverse of light absorption, super-elastic collision is the inverse of charged particle impact excitation, and collisional deactivation is the inverse of the thermal process, etc. 

In this brief review, the microscopic point of view will be used primarily. Also in view of the fact that the other participants at this symposium will discuss extensively the heavy particle aspects of discharges i.e., the chemistry, it would appear appropriate in this report to emphasize the role of the electron in discharges. In the final analysis the electron is the sine qua non of a gas discharge, the agent which transfers the energy from an electrical power supply to the gas, the producer of the ions which will engage in the ion chemistry, and the exciter of molecules which will dissociate to form the free radicals from whence originate the chemical chain processes. 

From a very general point of view every ion-atom collision system has to be treated as a correlated many-body time-dependent quantum system. To solve this from an ab initio point of view is still impossible. So, one has to rely on various approximations. Nowadays the best method which can be applied to realistic collision systems (which we discuss here) is on the level of the non-selfconsistent time-dependent Hartree-Fock-Slater or, in the relativistic case, the Dirac-Fock-Slater method. Up-to-now no correlation beyond this approximation can be taken into account in the case of 3 or more electrons. (This is in accordance with the definition of correlation given by Lowdin [1] in 1956) In addition no QED contributions, i.e. no correction to the 1/r Coulomb interaction between the electrons, ever have been taken into account, although in very heavy collision systems this effect may become important. This will be discussed in section 5. A short survey of the theory used is followed by our results on impact parameter dependent electron transfer and excitation calculations of ion-atom and ion-solid collisions as well as first results of an ab initio calculation of MO X-rays in such complicated many particle scattering systems. 

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