Radiative rates and electron impact excitation rates for transitions in Cr VIII^*

¹ Astrophysics Research Centre, School of Mathematics and Physics, Queen's University Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland, UK e-mail: K.Aggarwal@qub.ac.uk
² National Institute for Fusion Science, Oroshi-cho, Toki, Gifu, 509-5292 Japan

Received: 14 May 2009
Accepted: 24 August 2009

Abstract

Aims. In this paper we report on calculations of energy levels, radiative rates, oscillator strengths, line strengths, and effective collision strengths for transitions among the lowest 362 levels of the (1s²2s²2p⁶) 3s²3p⁵, 3s3p⁶, 3s²3p⁴3d, 3s3p⁵3d, 3s²3p³3d², 3s3p⁴3d², 3p⁶3d, and 3s²3p⁴4 configurations of Cr viii.

Methods. The general-purpose relativistic atomic structure package (grasp) and flexible atomic code (fac) are adopted for the calculations.

Results. Radiative rates, oscillator strengths, and line strengths are reported for all electric dipole (E1), magnetic dipole (M1), electric quadrupole (E2), and magnetic quadrupole (M2) transitions among the 362 levels. Comparisons are made with earlier available results and the accuracy of the data is assessed. Additionally, lifetimes for all 362 levels are listed, although comparisons with other theoretical results are limited to only a few levels. Our energy levels are estimated to be accurate to better than 3% (within 0.4 Ryd), whereas results for other parameters are probably accurate to better than 20%. Finally, electron impact collision strengths and excitation rates are computed for all transitions over a wide energy (temperature) range. For these calculations, FAC is adopted and results in the form of effective collision strengths are reported over a wide temperature range of 10^5.0-10^6.6 K.