Measurements on the glory structure in the total cross section of noble gas systems: III. Ar-Kr,Kr-Kr,Kr-Xe and Xe-Xe; application of the n(x)-6 potential

In a crossed supersonic atomic beam apparatus measurements have been performed on the glory structure in the total cross section of the heavy noble gas systems Kr-Kr, Kr-Xe and Xe-Xe. Refinements in the deconvolution procedures are described and the consistency of the results is tested on newly obtained data for the systems Ar-Kr and Kr-Ar. The overall accuracy of the data for all systems is better than 0.7%. Various potentials, proposed in literature, are tested. Agreement with the measured glory structure is only observed for the n(x)-6 and HFD-C type potentials for Ar-Kr and Kr-Kr. n(x)-6 potentials are constructed not only for Kr-Xe and Xe-Xe, but also for the previously studied Ne-systems and Ar-Xe. The result is that the relative total cross sections for all pairs of noble gas atoms (Ne, Ar, Kr and Xe) within experimental error can be described by a consistent set of n(x)-6 potentials. The obtained values for ? and r_m obey simple combining rules.     

Recent positron-atom cross section measurements and calculations

We review recent cross section results for low-energy positron scattering from atomic targets. A comparison of the latest measurements and calculations for positron collisions with the noble gases and a brief update of the newest studies on other atoms is presented. In particular, we provide an overview of the cross sections for elastic scattering, positronium formation, direct and total ionisation, as well as total scattering, at energies typically between about 0.1 and a few hundred eV. We discuss the differences in the current experimental data sets and compare those results to the available theoretical models. Recommended data sets for the total cross section are also reported for each noble gas. A summary of the recent developments in the scattering from other atoms, such as atomic hydrogen, the alkali and alkaline-earth metals, and two-electron systems is finally provided.     

Scattering of surface plasmon polaritons by a nanoparticle with the inclusion of the magnetic dipole contribution

Using the method of the tensor Green’s function of the wave equation, the differential and total cross sections for the scattering of surface optical electromagnetic waves (surface plasmon polaritons) by a spherical nanoparticle into surface plasmon polaritons and light have been obtained with the inclusion of the magnetic dipole contribution. Using the example of noble metal systems, it has been shown that the magnetic dipole contribution may significantly affect the angular dependence of the differential cross sections and increase their anisotropy as the plasmon wavelength increases.     

Ionisation of noble gases by positron impact

The positron induced absolute single and double ionisation cross sections for the noble gases Ar, Kr and Xe have been determined in the energy region from below threshold to ∼1000 eV. With the use of an admixture of He to the target gas normalisation was performed by comparison to known single ionisation cross sections for He. Special interest has been taken in the energy gap of 6.8 eV below the direct double ionisation threshold energy, where only double ionisation with positronium formation is possible. This has been done to study the significance of double ionisation with Ps formation for the heavy noble gases. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Excitation and Quencing of Rotational Energy Levels of the О3 Ozone Molecule by Collisions with Noble Gas Atoms (Ar and He)

Russian Physics Journal - The scattering cross sections of rotational excitations of O3 by collisions with noble gas atoms (Ar and He) have been calculated using the two-body scheme implemented in...     

Density-dependent photoabsorption cross sections of atomic Xe

The evolution of the photoabsorption cross sections of atomic xenon with number densities varying from ideal gas to condensed matter has been studied by an alternative view in the present work. The alternative expressions of the photoabsorption cross sections presented by Sun et al recently were used with the local field models that has proven to be generalized easily to multiatomic systems including molecules and condensed phase systems. The present results show that the variation of the photoabsorption cross sections of atomic xenon in the giant resonance region from the isolated to the condensed conditions is very small, which agrees well with the variation law of the solid and gas experiments.     

High energy collisions of protonated water clusters

We have measured attenuation cross sections and fragmentation cross sections for protonated water clusters H(H₂O)_n ⁺ (n = 1 to 100) colliding with noble gas atoms (He and Xe) at a laboratory energy of 50 keV. In collisions with He, a transparency effect in the attenuation cross section was observed. For the case of fragmentation in collisions with Xe, a strong enhancement of small clusters was observed which we attribute to multifragmentation. Received 30 November 2000     

Spectroscopy of He–Ne afterglow plasma

Implementation of promising control schemes for the intensity and position of X-ray-laser beams with a photon energy up to several tens of kiloelectronvolts requires knowledge of the angular dependence of cross sections for photoionization of noble gas atoms by hard photons. Estimates of quadrupole corrections to the cross section for photoionization of a Kr atom by X-ray photons with an energy of about 25 keV are reported in this paper. An analytic expression for the cross section of the process is parameterized in a compact form convenient for analyzing angular distributions with an arbitrary polarization of a photon beam.     

Glory undulations in the total cross section for scattering of heavy rare gas atoms

In a supersonic molecular beam apparatus the velocity dependence of the total cross section for scattering of argon and krypton beams by argon, krypton and xenon has been measured for relative velocities ranging from 0.55 to 4.30 km · s^-1. For all these systems a number of glory extrema were well resolved. The measured cross sections are compared with cross sections calculated on the basis of recently proposed pair potentials. For the systems Ar-Ar, Kr-Kr and Ar-Kr the glory structure is fairly well described by the potentials, however, the energy dependence of the cross sections is not. The available potentials for the systems Ar-Xe and Kr-Xe describe the glory structure less accurately. Rather severe changes of the potentials will be required to obtain agreement with the total cross section data. A qualitative analysis of the required changes is presented.     

Positronium formation for positron scattering from metastable hydrogen

Positronium(Ps) formation for positron impact on metastable hydrogen in 2s state has been studied by using the twochannel, two-center eikonal final state-continuum initial distorted wave(EFS-CDW) method. The differential, integrated,and total cross sections for Ps formation in different states have been calculated from each channel opening thresholds to high energy region. The results are compared with other theoretical calculations available in the literature. For Ps formation in s-state at intermediate and high energies, our results are in good agreement with the prediction of distorted wave theory.Those formed in p-states and the total Ps formation cross sections are reported for the first time. It is shown that the total Ps formation cross sections for positron scattering from H(2s) state are significantly larger at relatively low energies, while smaller at high energies, compared with those obtained from hydrogen in ground state.     

Positron scattering and ionization of neon atoms—theoretical investigations

Although positron scattering with inert gas atoms has been studied in theory as well as in experiment, there are discrepancies. The present work reports all the major total cross sections of e+-neon scattering at incident energies above ionization threshold, originating from a complex potential formalism. Elastic and cumulative inelastic scatterings are treated in the complex spherical e+-atom potential. Our total inelastic cross section includes positronium formation together with ionization and excitation channels in Ne. Because of the Ps formation channel it is difficult to separate out ionization cross sections from the total inelastic cross sections. An approximate method similar to electron-atom scattering has been applied to bifurcate ionization and cumulative excitation cross sections at energies from threshold to 2000 eV. Comparisons of present results with available data are made. An important outcome of this work is the relative contribution of different scattering processes, which we have shown by a bar-chart at the ionization peak.     

Reaction functions for weakly bound systems

We propose a new technique to analyze total reaction cross sections. In this technique, which has been previously applied to fusion reactions, the experimental data are used to build a dimensionless reaction function, which does not depend on the system size or details of the optical potential. In this way, total reaction cross sections for different systems can be directly compared. We employ this technique to perform a systematic study of reaction cross sections of weakly bound systems in different mass ranges, and compare their reaction functions with the ones of tightly bound systems with similar masses. We show that breakup reactions and neutron transfers in halo systems lead to large reaction functions, well above the ones of typical tightly or weakly bound stable systems.     

Measured total cross sections of slow neutrons scattered by gaseous and liquid 2H(2)

The total scattering cross sections for slow neutrons with energies E in the range 300 neV to 3 meV for gaseous and liquid ortho-2H2 have been measured. The cross sections for 2H2 gas are found to be in excellent agreement with both the Hamermesh and Schwinger and the Young and Koppel models. For liquid 2H(2), we confirm the existing experimental data in the cold neutron range and the discrepancy with the gas models. We find a clear 1 / square root[E'] dependence at low energies for both states. A simple explanation for the liquid 2H2 cross section is offered.     

Positron scattering from hydrogen atom embedded in weakly-coupled plasmas

Elastic scattering of positrons from the hydrogen atoms in weakly-coupled plasmas has been studied using an expression for partial wave scattering amplitude that has been derived within the framework second order distorted wave Born approximation. The interactions among the charged particles in the plasma have been represented by Debye-Hückel potentials. A detailed study has been made on differential and total cross sections in the energy range 20–300 eV. To the best of our knowledge such a study on the differential and total cross sections for elastic positron-hydrogen collisions in a weakly-coupled plasma environment is reported for the first time in the literature.     

Electron-induced scattering dynamics of Boron,Aluminium and Gallium trihalides in the intermediate energy domain

This article is focused on the calculation of electron-induced ionisation and total scattering cross sections by Boron, Aluminium and Gallium trihalide molecules in the intermediate energy domain. The computational formalism, spherical complex optical potential has been employed for the study of these two scattering cross sections. The ionisation cross section has been derived from the inelastic cross section using a semi-empirical method called complex scattering potential-ionisation contribution (CSP-ic) method. We have also calculated the ionisation cross section using the BEB theory with Hartree–Fock and density functional theory (DFT- ωB97XD) orbitals so that a comparison can be made with the cross sections predicted by CSP-ic method. For this theoretical study, we have also calculated polarisability and bond length of some targets which were not found in literature using DFT/B3LYP in Gaussian 09 software.     

Reduction Methods for Total Reaction Cross Sections

The most frequently used methods to reduce fusion and total reaction excitation functions were investigated in a very recent paper Canto et al. (Phys Rev C 92:014626, 2015). These methods are widely used to eliminate the influence of masses and charges in comparisons of cross sections for weakly bound and tightly bound systems. This study reached two main conclusions. The first is that the fusion function method is the most successful procedure to reduce fusion cross sections. Applying this method to theoretical cross sections of single channel calculations, one obtains a system independent curve (the fusion function), that can be used as a benchmark to fusion data. The second conclusion was that none of the reduction methods available in the literature is able to provide a universal curve for total reaction cross sections. The reduced single channel cross sections keep a strong dependence of the atomic and mass numbers of the collision partners, except for systems in the same mass range. In the present work we pursue this problem further, applying the reduction methods to systems within a limited mass range. We show that, under these circumstances, the reduction of reaction data may be very useful.     

Optical pumping of ions in buffer gases

Transient signals measured with a pulsed rf-optical pumping method are used to determine longitudinal relaxation rates for Sr⁺ ions (even isotopes) in noble gas buffers. Depolarization cross sections of the electronic spin in the Sr⁺5² S _1/2 ground state for binary collisions with rare gas atoms are deduced. The results for σ(Sr⁺5² S _1/2) in Ų are (at temperatures between 374 and 449 °K): 2·10^?5(He),4·10^?5(Ne), 5.7·10^?3(Ar), 1.8·10^?2(Kr), and 4.0·10^?2(Xe). These cross sections for the Sr⁺ ion are about two to three orders of magnitude larger than the corresponding ones for the isoelectronic neutral Rb atom. The large increase of the Sr⁺ relaxation rates is explained with the relaxation mechanism of spin-orbit coupling, taking into account two “indirect” effects of the ionic charge: the increase in the gas kinetic cross sections and the more intimate collisions of the Sr⁺ ion with the noble gas atoms. The depolarization is shown to be predominantly due to short-range interactions. A contribution to the relaxation of the Sr⁺ ion from Sr⁺-noble gas molecule formation, induced by three-body or resonant two-body collisions, could not be established for applied pressuresp between 1.5 and 15 Torr of Ar, Kr, and Xe.     

Low energy elastic differential electron scattering from H2O

Normalized differential cross sections for elastic (rotationally averaged) electron scattering from gaseous water (H2O) are obtained using the relative flow method against helium with a thin aperture collimating source of gas instead of a tube. This method obviates the use of gas kinetic molecular diameters for helium or water. Our measurements are found to be largely in quantitative disagreement with past differential elastic electron scattering measurements and suggest that present recommended electron scattering total cross sections for water be revised.     

Low-energy positron scattering from gas-phase uracil

Quantum scattering calculations are presented for the interaction of low energy positrons with the uracil molecule, an important component of biological systems. The rotational elastic and inelastic cross sections and vibrational inelastic cross sections are reported and compared with existing experiments, indicating a general trend of the cross sections different from the experimental findings and in line with what should be expected from the behavior of the total cross sections in similar polar targets. Some specific considerations can be drawn on the reliability of existing experiments, as to their size vis-à-vis to the computed integral cross sections over the same range of energies.     

Excitation in gas-phase collisions at intermediate and high velocities

A summary of experimental and theoretical total excitation cross sections of light ion atom systems for intermediate and high velocities is given. The velocity dependence of cross sections is compared and similarities for different collision systems are pointed out. The experimental data are compared with theoretical calculations.