Inelastic and ballistic processes resulting from CsF--Ar collisions

This paper continues the study of inelastic and ballistic collisions for the CsF--Ar system using the impulse approximation (IA). The IA expresses the atom--diatom potential as the sum of the two atom--atom potentials. The atom--atom interaction is approximated by a hard core potential, and the laboratory differential cross sections are calculated for an initial relative translational energy of 1.0 eV as a function of the laboratory recoil velocity of CsF. The calculated differential cross sections are in excellent agreement with the experimental measurements for all eight laboratory scattering angles for which the data are available. While the calculated results show no significant dependence on the initial relative velocity or on the initial vibrational quantum number of CsF, they do show a systematic variation with the initial rotational quantum number---the ballistic effect is more pronounced than that observed experimentally for initial quantum rotational numbers less than 30 and is not pronounced enough for rotational quantum numbers more than 100. Two mechanisms give rise to the ballistic peak. The first one is dominant when the laboratory scattering angle is equal, or nearly equal, to the laboratory angle of the centroid velocity. This mechanism transfers almost all of the relative translational energy into the internal energy of the diatom and magnifies the center-of-mass (c.m.) differential cross section almost a million times. This is due to a singularity in the Jacobian at very small c.m. recoil velocities, which physically means that a small solid angle in the laboratory frame can collect the signal from all 4π steradians in the c.m. frame