Journal of Chemical Physics, Vol.118, No.6, 2760-2766, 2003
Inhomogeneous gas model for electron mobility in high density neon gas
Experimental studies of electron mobilities in Neon as a function of the gas density up to moderately high densities have persistently shown mobilities up to an order of magnitude smaller than expected and predicted. A previously ignored mechanism (gas in-homogeneity which is negligible in the thermal mobilities for He and other gases) is found to reproduce the observed Neon mobilities accurately and simply at five temperatures with just the density deficit as the single variable parameter. Recognizing that a gas is not a homogeneous medium, a variation in local density, combined with the quantum multiscattering theory, shifts the energy and cross section-which in turn changes the collision probability and finally the mobilities. A lower density where a momentum transfer interaction occurs moves the mobility strongly in the same direction as the anomalous results of the experiments. By going backwards from the observed mobilities, the collision frequency at each temperature and density is made to reproduce the experimental data by looking for the local (as opposed to average) density at which the (rare) momentum transfer interactions occur. These density deviations give a picture of the size and behavior of the wave packets for electron motion which looks very much like the often discussed wave function collapse. (C) 2003 American Institute of Physics.