Generation of metastable rare-gas beams and studies of electron-metastable collision processes. Final technical report, January 1, 1990--September 30, 1991

The basic goals of this research effort of designing, developing, and testing a high-flux, high-purity metastable rare-gas beam source suitable for measurements of electron-collisions have been achieved. Here the authors briefly describe the status of this effort. This effort will be pursued with support from other sources of funding and results of this subsequent effort will be made available to Los Alamos National Laboratory. On the theoretical side they have extended their procedure for calculating the cross sections for electron impact excitation of molecules to determine these cross sections for collisions with metastable states of molecules. As a relevant application they have studied the differential and integral cross sections for the a {sup 1}{Delta}{sub g} {yields} b {sup 1}{Sigma}{sub g}{sup +} transition in O{sub 2} for which measurements (R.I. Hall and S. Trajmar, J. Phys. B 8, L293 (1975)) were available at a single energy (4.5 eV). The agreement between the calculated and measured values of these cross sections is encouraging and support the large value reported experimentally