Penning ionization of N2O molecules by He*(2(3,1)S) and Ne*(3P2,0) metastable atoms: theoretical considerations about the intermolecular interactions.

A theoretical investigation of the intermolecular interaction, operative in collision complexes of He*(2 3S1), He*(2 1S0), and Ne*(3P2,0) with N2O, is carried out to explain the main results of the experimental study reported in the preceding paper. The analysis is carried out by means of a semiempirical method based on the identification, modeling, and combination of the leading interaction components, including the effect of the selective polarization of the more external electronic cloud of the metastable atom in the intermolecular electric field. These and other crucial aspects of our approach have been quantitatively verified by ab initio calculations. The proposed method permits to evaluate the interaction at any configuration of the complexes and provides a useful and inexpensive representation of the intermolecular potential energy for dynamics studies. The main experimental findings can be rationalized taking into account the critical balancing between molecular orientation effects in the intermolecular interaction field and the ionization probability. These orientation effects tend to become less pronounced with increasing collision energy.