Passive Measurement of Hydrogen Ground State Rotational and Vibrational Temperatures in Kinetic Plasmas
Authors: D.R. Farley, D.P. Ludberg and S.A. Cohen
Abstract:
A dipole-quadrupole electron-impact excitation model, consistent with molecular symmetry rules, is presented to fit ro-vibronic spectra of the hydrogen Fulcher-α Q-branch line emissions for passively measuring the rotational temperature of hydrogen neutral molecules in kinetic plasmas with the coronal equilibrium approximation. A quasi-rotational temperature and quadrupole contribution factor are adjustable parameters in the model. Quadrupole excitation is possible due to a violation of the 1st Born approximation for low to medium energy electrons (up to several hundred eV). The Born-Oppenheimer and Franck-Condon approximations are implicitly shown to hold. A quadrupole contribution of 10% is shown to fit experimental data at several temperatures from different experiments with electron energies from several to 100 eV. A convenient chart is produced to graphically determine the vibrational temperature of the hydrogen molecules from diagonal band intensities, if the ground state distribution is Boltzmann. Hydrogen vibrational modes are long-lived, surviving up to thousands of wall collisions, consistent with multiple other molecular dynamics computational results. The importance of inter-molecular collisions during a plasma pulse are also discussed.
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Submitted to: Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer (May 2010)
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Download PPPL-4548 (pdf 413 KB 42 pp)
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