Inelastic processes in copper–hydrogen collisions including fine-structure effects

Abstract

Abstract Inelastic processes in low-energy Cu + H and Cu+ + H− collisions, 306 partial processes in total, are investigated taking fine-structure effects into account. We use the asymptotic approach to model the adiabatic potentials and adapt a recently proposed method to include the copper fine structure. The nuclear dynamics is performed by the multichannel analytical approach and the Landau–Zener model. The rate coefficients are calculated for the temperature range of 1000–10 000 K. The largest rate coefficient is obtained for the mutual neutralization process Cu+ + H− → Cu(3d105s 2S1/2) + H with a value of $3.81 \times 10^{-8}\, {\rm cm}^3\,{\rm s^{-1}}$ at a temperature of 6000 K . It is shown that the practice to redistribute LS-coupling rate coefficients among fine-structure sublevels can give rates that deviate significantly from those calculated in the JJ-coupling scheme, that is with account for the fine-structure effects.