Collisional radiative model for the Xenon plasma using reliable cross sections

Xenon is used nearly in all modern HETs as propellant. Also, xenon is added as trace a gas to characterize the low temperature plasmas. Therefore, it is very important to develop reliable collisional radiative model for xenon. The leading process in the low temperature xenon plasma is electron impact excitation of the various fine structure levels involved from the ground as well as excited states. For the appropriate plasma model, accurate electron impact excitation cross section data are required which at present are not available. Our aim is to obtain highly needed detailed fine-structure resolved cross sections for electron impact excitation of xenon using relativistic distorted wave (RDW) approach and demonstrate the application of the calculated data in modelling of low temperature xenon plasma by developing a CR model following our earlier work on Cs. Various transitions from the ground 5p⁶ state to the excited 5p⁵6s, 5p⁵6p, 5p⁵5d, 5p⁵7s and 5p⁵7p as well as among these excited states are considered and their corresponding cross sections are reported. In view of this, A C-R model is developed by incorporating our obtained cross sections. Further, coupling the C-R model with the optical emission spectroscopy (OES) measurements of Czerwiec et al., diagnostic of the low temperature inductively coupled (ICP) xenon plasma is performed. The plasma parameters are extracted viz. electron temperature (T_e) and electron density (n_e) for H-mode transitions of xenon discharge. (author)