Determination of cross sections and rate coefficients for the electron impact dissociation of NO2

Abstract

Energy dependent and angle dependent differential cross sections for the production of the NO2+, NO+, O2+, N+ and O+ ions resulting from dissociative ionization of NO2 by electron collision have been evaluated at a fixed incident electron energy. The semi-empirical formulation based on the well-known Jain-Khare formulation which requires the oscillator strength data as input has been employed. As no previous data seem to exist for differential cross sections, we have derived the partial and total ionization cross sections from these differential cross sections from ionization threshold up to 1000 eV and compared with available experimental and theoretical data. We also evaluated the ionization rate coefficients on the basis of calculated partial ionization cross sections and Maxwell-Boltzmann energy distributions. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.