Further developments and applications of sensitivity analysis to collisional energy transfer

This paper considers the sensitivity of collision cross sections to the variation of intermolecular potential parameters. The study is restricted to the scattering of an atom and a linear rigid rotor, and to an atom and a breathing sphere. Attention is focused upon first order sensitivity coefficients (i.e., the gradient of cross sections with respect to potential parameters) from which an entire family of derived sensitivity coefficients may be obtained. Within this family a special class of coefficients is shown to be particularly important in determining the extent to which a set of measurements is able to define the parameters of an assumed potential. Finally, the global behavior of cross sections in parameter space is examined, and a nonlinear interpolation formula is suggested which utilizes sensitivity information