Collisional Destruction of the 63P1 State of Mercury

Abstract

Inclusion of collisional destruction mechanisms as sink terms in the theory of imprisonment of resonance radiation appears to have been neglected in the case of the 2537-Å mercury line. In this paper, the Holstein photon transport equation is employed to determine the effect of destructive or self-quenching collisions between resonance state and ground state atoms, processes in which the resonance state is converted to another excited state with the release of kinetic energy. These mechanisms seem to explain experimental work in which the decay constant of the 2537-Å mercury line reaches a minimum and then increases with density. Comparison of theory with experimental data yields a cross section between 3.0 and 10.0 × 10−18 for the conversion of Hg(3P1) to metastable Hg(3P0) by two-body collisions with Hg(1S0). The sharp increase at high density of the decay constant of the 2537-Å mercury line has not been predicted by previous theories but is a general consequence of the inclusion of collisional destruction mechanisms.