Comparisons and scaling rules between N+N₂ and N₂+N₂ collision induced dissociation cross sections from atomistic studies

Quantitative knowledge of elementary processes involved in plasmas are key to successfully perform accurate kinetic simulations. The issue is the huge amount of data to treat, both in the dynamical calculation and in the kinetic simulation. The aim of this paper is to study the dissociation in atom–molecule (AM) and molecule–molecule (MM) collisions involving nitrogen, obtained by molecular dynamics calculations considering vibrational states in the range 10–50 and collision energy up to 10 eV, in order to formulate suitable scaling laws resulting in less expensive computational procedures and easier to handle treatments in kinetic simulations. It is shown that, while a direct substitution of MM dissociation cross sections with AM ones might be acceptable only at very high collision energy, scaling laws application allows to obtain quite good results on almost the whole energy range of interest. (paper)