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Published 1996 | public
Book Section - Chapter

Highly Parallel Computational Techniques for Electron-Molecule Collisions

Abstract

Though most of the current knowledge of electron–molecule collisions derives from experiments, accurate measurements of collision cross sections are quite difficult, especially for inelastic processes; few groups worldwide have undertaken this challenging work. Demand for cross section data already exceeds supply and the list of "critical" but absent data grows longer daily. Moreover, the species of interest include not only stable molecules, but also those radicals and ions whose populations within the plasma may be significant and experiments will be all the more difficult for such transient species. Most recent theoretical studies of electron–molecule collisions have relied on variational approximations to the scattering amplitude or to some closely related quantity, thereby avoiding direct numerical solution of Schrodinger's equation. However, the studies of many-electron systems remain numerically intensive despite the choice of an efficient theoretical approach and the work discussed in the chapter depends on exploiting the prodigious advances in computational power that have resulted from the development of massively parallel processors.

Additional Information

© 1996 Academic Press. This work was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, by the National Science Foundation (including support under the Grand Challenge project "Parallel I/O Methodologies for I/O Intensive Grand Challenge Applications"), and by SEMATECH, Inc. Use of the computational facilities of the JPL/Caltech Supercomputing Project and of the Concurrent Supercomputing Consortium is gratefully acknowledged.

Additional details

Created:
August 20, 2023
Modified:
October 25, 2023