Integral cross sections of the dipole‐allowed excitations of nitrogen molecule studied by the fast electron scattering

Abstract

Abstract The integral cross sections (ICSs) of the electron scattering of nitrogen molecule are of great importance to the understanding of many different aspects of atmospheric physics. In the present work, the generalized oscillator strengths (GOSs) of the valence shell excitations of , , , , and of nitrogen have been determined by fast electron scattering at an incident electron energy of 1500 eV and an energy resolution of 70 meV. By cross‐checking strictly the present results with the previous electron scattering and inelastic X‐ray scattering (IXS) ones, the accuracy and reliability of the GOSs for the corresponding dipole‐allowed transitions of nitrogen are tested stringently. Based on the accurate GOSs of these dipole‐allowed transitions, their ICSs are obtained systematically from the threshold to 5000 eV for the first time with the aid of the BE‐Scaling (B is the binding energy and E is the excitation energy) method, and the corresponding ICSs at the moderate and high energies are the only available data to the best of our knowledge.