Electron Impact Ionization and Excitation of the Rare Gases and Excitation of Molecular Hydrogen and Molecular Nitrogen.

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This project will concern the investigation of controlled reactions of directed incident electron beams with fundamental gaseous atoms and diatomic molecules. The laboratory at Cal State Fullerton will investigate details of the scattering process involving excitation of strong transitions in these targets specifically to look at how spin and orbital angular momentum is imparted by the incident directed electrons onto the target atoms/molecules. The targets chosen are the rare gases (neon, argon, krypton and xenon) and the molecules are hydrogen and nitrogen which have different electron-nuclear couplings. The research also aims to look at the ionization of the atomic targets. The thrust of this is to investigate the basic collision quantum physics that describes such processes. The broader impact of this work is its involvement in state of the art research of many US undergraduate students at Cal State Fullerton in the laboratory. They then have a significantly increased chance to go onto PhD programs (mostly nationally, but in one case internationally). The research training also provided skills needed for working in industry or in other laboratories. These students get to do frontline research and benefit from collaborating with each other and faculty. It also provides collaborative research between Cal State Fullerton and several other theoretical and experimental collision physics programs, both nationally and internationally. The success of this group with data that tests collision models such as (most recently) the R-matrix B-spline was especially highlighted in the keynote talk at the last American Physical Society- Gaseous Electronics Conference at Salt Lake City. Such type of data is useful for industrial, plasma and astrophysical applications.