Atomic data from the Iron Project. LXIV. Radiative transition rates and collision strengths for Ca II

TL;DR

This paper provides detailed calculations of radiative transition rates and collision strengths for Ca II, improving accuracy through advanced methods and comparing results with recent measurements and other theoretical approaches.

Contribution

It introduces comprehensive atomic data for Ca II using sophisticated quantum mechanical methods, including relativistic effects and core polarization, with extensive comparisons to existing data.

Findings

Core polarization impacts lifetimes by up to 20%.

Results agree closely with recent lifetime measurements.

Effective collision strengths differ by ~11% from experimental values.

Abstract

This work reports radiative transition rates and electron impact excitation rate coefficients for levels of the n= 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 configurations of Ca II. The radiative data were computed using the Thomas-Fermi-Dirac central potential method in the frozen core approximation and includes the polarization interaction between the valence electron and the core using a model potential. This method allows for configuration interactions (CI) and relativistic effects in the Breit-Pauli formalism. Collision strengths in LS-coupling were calculated in the close coupling approximation with the R-matrix method. Then, fine structure collision strengths were obtained by means of the intermediate-coupling frame transformation (ICFT) method which accounts for spin-orbit coupling effects. We present extensive comparisons with the most recent calculations and measurements for Ca II as well as a comparison between the core polarization results and the "unpolarized" values. We find that core polarization affects the computed lifetimes by up to 20%. Our results are in very close agreement with recent measurements for the lifetimes of metastable levels. The present collision strengths were integrated over a Maxwellian distribution of electron energies and the resulting effective collision strengths are given for a wide range of temperatures. Our effective collision strengths for the resonance transitions are within ~11% from previous values derived from experimental measurements, but disagree with latter computations using the distorted wave approximation.