Calibration of distorted wave Born approximation for electron impact excitation of Ne and Ar at incident energies below 100 eV

TL;DR

This paper empirically calibrates the distorted wave Born approximation (DWBA) for electron impact excitation of neon and argon at energies below 100 eV, improving its accuracy for modeling laser-induced atomic processes.

Contribution

It introduces an empirical calibration method for DWBA, enhancing its reliability in describing electron impact excitation at low energies.

Findings

DWBA reproduces DCS structure well

Magnitude overestimated by DWBA in most cases

Calibration enables DWBA to model laser-induced excitation

Abstract

We calibrate the distorted wave Born approximation (DWBA) for electron impact excitation processes empirically. Differential cross sections (DCS) for the excitation of the $2p^53s$, $2p^53p$,$2p^54s$, and $2p^54p$ configurations of Ne and the $3p^54s$ and $3p^54p$ configurations of Ar by electron impact are calculated using DWBA for incident energies between 20 and 100 eV. The calculated results are compared with the absolute experimental measurements and other theoretical results. We found that the structure of the DCS can be well reproduced by the DWBA model while the magnitude is overestimated for most cases considered here. The differences in magnitude between DWBA and experiment are used to test the calibration of DWBA such that the DWBA can be used to describe laser-induced electron impact excitation processes. These processes are involved in the non-sequential double ionization of atoms in strong laser fields.