Photoionization Cross-Sections of Molecular Species: Computational Methods and Comparison

Radiative properties of heated air species are vital ingredients in detecting, modeling, and characterizing transport. This information can be utilized to describe the radiative energy transfer, collisional-radiative, radiation-hydrodynamic, and plasma kinetic models which are utilized to model spectra, energy transfer, and bulk-plasma transport in media such as the atmosphere and proto-planetary disks. One of main challenges of calculating accurate and complete molecular radiation data is with the modeling of the bound-free photoionization contribution to the opacity. Here we overview methods and results on ab Initio wavefunction and density-functional theory methods for computing bound-free photoionization cross-sections in several molecular species.