Electron impact excitation of the iron peak element Fe II

Effective collision strengths for electron-impact excitation of Fe II are presented for all sextet-to-quartet transitions among the 38 LS states formed from the basis configurations 3d64s, 3d7 and 3d64p. A total of 112 individual transitions are considered at electron temperatures in the range 30-100,000 K, encompassing values of importance for applications in astrophysics as well as laboratory plasmas. A limited comparison is made with earlier theoretical work and large differences are found to occur at the temperatures considered. In particular, it is found that the inclusion or omission of some (N+1)-bound configurations in the Hamiltonian matrices describing the collision process can have a huge effect on the resulting effective collision strengths, by up to a factor of four in some cases. (author)