Chemi-ionization in Solar Photosphere: Influence on the Hydrogen Atom excited States Population

TL;DR

This study investigates how chemi-ionization and recombination processes involving hydrogen atoms affect excited-state populations in the solar photosphere, highlighting their dominance over electron-driven processes and their significance for solar atmosphere modeling.

Contribution

It demonstrates that chemi-ionization and recombination processes dominate over electron processes in the solar photosphere, emphasizing their importance in non-LTE modeling.

Findings

Chemi-ionization processes dominate in the solar photosphere.

Inverse chemi-recombination significantly influences hydrogen excited states.

These processes are crucial for accurate solar atmosphere models.

Abstract

In this paper, the influence of chemi-ionization processes in $H^*(n \ge 2) + H(1s)$ collisions, as well as the influence of inverse chemi-recombination processes on hydrogen atom excited-state populations in solar photosphere, are compared with the influence of concurrent electron-atom and electron-ion ionization and recombination processes. It has been found that the considered chemi-ionization/recombination processes dominate over the relevant concurrent processes in almost the whole solar photosphere. Thus, it is shown that these processes and their importance for the non-LTE modeling of the solar atmosphere should be investigated further.