RELATIVISTIC CALCULATION OF TRANSITION PROBABILITIES FOR 557.7 nm AND 297.2 nm EMISSION LINES IN OXYGEN

The 557.7 nm green line and the 297.2 nm ultraviolet line in oxygen have been studied extensively due to their importance in astrophysics and atmospheric science. Despite the enormous effort devoted to these two prominent transition lines over 30 years, and in fact going back to 1934, the ratio of their transition probabilities remains a subject of major discrepancies amongst various theoretical calculations for many decades. Moreover, theoretical results are inconsistent with available laboratory results, as well as recent spacecraft measurements of Earth's airglow. This work presents new relativistic theoretical calculations of the transition probabilities of these two photoemission lines from neutral oxygen using the multi-configuration Dirac-Hartree-Fock method. Our calculations were performed in both length and velocity gauges in order to check for accuracy and consistency, with agreement to 8%. Whilst remaining a challenging computation, these results directly bear upon interpretations of plasma processes and ionization regimes in the universe.