Reactive, Inelastic, and Dissociation Processes in Collisions of Atomic Nitrogen with Molecular Oxygen

Collisions
of atomic nitrogen with molecular oxygen have been treated
with the quasiclassical trajectory method (QCT) in order to obtain
a complete database of vibrationally detailed cross sections and rate
coefficients for reactive, inelastic, and dissociation processes.
For reaction rate coefficients, the agreement with experimental and
theoretical data in the literature is excellent on the whole available
interval 300–5000 K, with reliable extension to 20,000 K. For
the inelastic case and for dissociation, no comparisons are available;
therefore, a study of QCT reliability is proposed. In the inelastic
case, it is found that “purely inelastic” and “quasireactive”
collisions show not only different mechanisms but also different QCT
levels of reliability at low energy. For dissociation, similar considerations
bring to the conclusion that for the present collisional system, the
QCT method is appropriate on the whole energy range studied. Rate
coefficients for all the processes studied are provided in the electronic
form.