Photoionizational Plasmas. I. Theory

Abstract

In this paper, an attempt is made to define the subject of photoionizational plasmas through rigorous mathematical formalism. The central results of this paper are the following. (1) A set of recursive equations is introduced for the computation of the charge state distributions in photoionizational plasmas. (2) Quantitative validity limits are given for both the collisional and the photoionizational domains. (3) A parameter that determines the charge state distribution in the photoionizational regime is introduced. (4) We provide detailed discussion about the most important components of the emission spectrum in the different equilibrium domains of the emitting plasma. Some of these components have not been reported so far as included in the analysis of such plasmas.

Influence of X-ray radiation on the hot star wind ionization state and on the radiative force

“…This may be modified in the presence of wind clumping, which may weaken the effect of X-ray ionization because of increased recombination inside clumps . Salzmann et al (2011) propose an alternative ionization parameter…”

Modeling non-local thermodynamic equilibrium plasma using the Flexible Atomic Code data

“…Several similar codes, which are being used for analysis of astrophysical spectra, have already been published in the literature. Examples are GALAXY (Rose 1998, Foord et al 2004, Foord et al 2006, Rose et al 2004), NIMP (Djaoui & Rose 1992, Rose et al 2004), FLYCHK (Chung et al 2003), CLOUDY (Ferland et al 1998), XSTAR (Kallman et al 1996, Kallman et al 2004, Boroson et al 2003, PhiCRE (Salzmann et al 2011 and SASAL (Liang et al 2014). Some of these codes are used to interpret laboratory experiments (GALAXY, FLYCHK, NIMP and PhiCRE), while others are used in analysis of astrophysical spectra (CLOUDY and XSTAR), while RCF is designed to be applicable to both of the conditions above.…”

“…The atomic databases of CLOUDY are accurate enough to be comparable with spectral emission data (Ferland et al 1998, Foord et al 2006, but there still are some obvious disparities between it and the experiment. The energy levels and spontaneous decay rates of PhiCRE are taken from the NIST database, and other rate coefficients are calculated by widely used formulas (Salzmann et al 2011.…”

Studies of x-ray emission properties of photoionized plasmas

“…In PIE the ratio of the x-ray flux to the electron density is sufficiently high so that photoionization processes are much more frequent than the collisional ionization ones (Heeter et al 2000). In other words, the parameter n n , 1 e ( ) h º j which is the ratio between the local spectrum-integrated photon density, n j , and the local energy-integrated electron density, n e , is relatively large (Salzmann et al 2011). Another similar parameter in common use is the ionization parameter…”