Electron-molecule collision calculations for plasma physics applications

Plasma models require data on electron driven process for a wide variety of species. Cool plasmas such as those that occur naturally in the Earth's ionosphere and the interstellar medium or those harnessed for a wide variety of technological processes are largely molecular. These molecular plasma include many transient species whose behavior when colliding with electrons is poorly known and hard to characterize experimentally. My group performs calculations which use the fully quantum-mechanical R-matrix method to perform calculations on a variety of plasma problems including rotational excitation of interstellar molecular ions, excitation of fusion plasma edge species and collisions with molecules important for plasma etching. My talk will feature illustrative examples of such applications including: \begin{itemize} \item Rotational excitation and dissociative recombination of the argonium ion (ArH$^+$) which was recently been found to be ubiquitous in diffuse interstellar molecular clouds; \item Development of a radiative-collisional model for BeH/BeD/BeT, a species whose emission spectra is being actively monitored in fusion plasmas; \item An electron chemistry of NF$_3$ and its fragments (NF$_2$ and NF) which are important in remote plasma sources which are being developed for isotropic etching and thin film deposition in microelectronics fabrication. \end{itemize}