Assessment of N2 De-Excitation Reactions in a Low-Pressure Electron Beam Plasma Simulation

A previous study compared an electron beam plasma experiment to a rigid beam model [1]. With the inclusion of beam impact ionization events, the results showed good agreement (within ~1.5 factor) at pressures between 1 and 10 Torr. The reduced chemistry set in Ref. [1] includes forward reactions for molecular nitrogen, initially, in its ground state to rotational, vibrational, excited and ionized states of N2. With the exception of one recombination reaction added into the model, no other advanced processes have been considered.