Vibrational relaxation of diatomic molecules in a non-Boltzmann thermostat

Abstract

The action of resonance IR laser radiation on a molecular gas leads, at high-power absorption intensity, to a breakdown in the equilibrium (Boltzmann) energy distribution in the internal degrees of freedom [1]. Under realistic conditions, molecular gases usually are (due to small amounts of impurities or isotopic components) multicomponent systems. In this case resonance IR laser radiation (or other methods of selective action), disturbing the distribution function of the primary gas, does not interact directly with impurities. The problem thus arises of determining the distribution function of the impurity gas interacting with the nonequilibrium (non-Boltzmann) thermostat. The present paper, devoted to the solution of this problem, treats the distribution function of harmonic oscillators A, consisting of a small amount of impurities in a system of harmonic oscillators B with given nonequilibrium distribution functions of vibrational energy. The behavior of a system in a nonequilibrium thermostat was first considered in [2, 3] where, as well as in [4, 5], it was shown that in a non-Maxwellian thermostat with a small amount of harmonic oscillator impurities, a Boltzmann distribution in harmonic oscillator vibrational energies is established under stationary conditions, with a temperature differing from the gas-kinetic temperature of the thermostat, defined in terms of the mean-square velocity. The behavior of a small amount of impurities (heavy monoatomic particles and harmonic oscillators) in a non-Maxwellian thermostat of a light gas was further investigated in [6–8]. Unlike the papers mentioned, the present one considers the behavior of a small amount of harmonic oscillator impurities in a thermostat with a Maxwellian velocity distribution and with a nonequilibrium (non-Boltzmann) distribution in vibrational energies.