Abstract
The hydroxyl radical, OH, is an important component of many natural and technological plasmas but there is little available information on processes involving its collisions with low-energy electrons. Low energy electron collisions with OH are studied in the framework of the R-matrix method. Potential energy curves of some of the low lying target states of doublet and quartet symmetry which go to the O(3P)+H(2S), O(1D)+H(2S) and O(1S)+H(2S) asymptotic limits are obtained for internuclear separations between . Scattering calculations are performed at the OH equilibrium geometry to yield cross sections for elastic scattering, electronic excitations from the ground state to the first three excited states of symmetry and for electron impact dissociation of OH. The positions and widths for negative ion resonances in the e–OH system are used to estimate the cross section for dissociative electron attachment to OH which is found to be significant at electron energies about 1.5 eV.
Highlights
The hydroxyl radical, OH, is a key component of many plasmas include atmospheric ones, if the air is humid [1,2,3,4,5,6,7] or near liquid water [8,9,10], and plasmas formed during combustion [11, 12]
Scattering calculations are performed at the OH equilibrium geometry Re = 1.8342 a0 to yield cross sections for elastic scattering, electronic excitations from the X 2P ground state to the first three excited states of A 2S+, a 4S, 1 2S- symmetry and for electron impact dissociation of OH
We present our results for the OH− bound states, resonance positions and widths at Re = 1.8342 a0, cross sections for elastic scattering, electronic excitations and estimate of the dissociative electron attachment (DEA) cross sections
Summary
The hydroxyl radical, OH, is a key component of many plasmas include atmospheric ones, if the air is humid [1,2,3,4,5,6,7] or near liquid water [8,9,10], and plasmas formed during combustion [11, 12]. A limited study of the vibrationally inelastic cross sections, both integrated and differential, for the excitation of the ν = 1 vibrational level of the electronic ground state was performed by Chen and Morgan [26] in the energy range 0–3 eV using the R-matrix method. Cross section for electron impact ionisation and rate coefficients for OH(X 2Π) OH(A 2S+) excitations were obtained by Riahi et al [16] using the WTCS theory which is essentially a model calculation.
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