Effect of dielectronic recombination on the kinetics of neonlike selenium

Abstract

In the recent successful demonstration of a soft-x-ray laser in neonlike selenium, the 3p-3s, J=0-1 transition, which had been predicted to show very high gain, did not appear to be amplified. Most previous calculations have assumed that the dominant pumping mechanism is electron collisional excitation, and have neglected the effects of ionization and recombination on the kinetics of neonlike levels. In this work, we studied the effects of collisional ionization and three-body, radiative, and dielectronic recombination, connecting the three fluorinelike ground states to the lowest 89 levels of neonlike Se. Our results show that dielectronic recombination is a significant process for populating the J=2 upper laser levels, and must be considered to model accurately the excited-state kinetics of the neonlike ion.