Theory of light-induced drift. V. Roles of accommodation of normal and tangential momenta in surface light-induced drift

Abstract

Surface light-induced drift (SLID) of a rarefied gas in cells with flat-plate and circular-cylindrical geometries is studied, and exact analytical solutions to the model rate equations are obtained in the limit of large Knudsen number. The model rate equations, which have not appeared before, have been tailored specifically in order to study the roles played in SLID, in a physically realistic setting, by both the tangential momentum and the normal momentum molecule-surface accommodation coefficients. Because the model equations are new (to the best of our knowledge), the results are generally different from those of previous work, although emphasis is placed on obtaining relations between the present and previous results; applications to experiments may be made by means of those relations.