Relaxation of hot and massive tracers using numerical solutions of the Boltzmann equation.

A numerical method using B-splines is used to solve the linear Boltzmann equation describing the energy relaxation of massive tracer particles moving through a dilute bath gas. The smooth and rough hard sphere and Maxwell molecule models are used with a variety of mass ratios and initial energies to test the capability of the numerical method. Massive tracers are initialized with energies typically found in energy loss experiments in mass spectrometry using biomolecules.

Kernels of the linear Boltzmann equation for spherical particles and rough hard sphere particles.

Kernels for the collision integral of the linear Boltzmann equation are presented for several cases. First, a rigorous and complete derivation of the velocity kernel for spherical particles is given, along with reductions to the smooth, rigid sphere case. This combines and extends various derivations for this kernel which have appeared previously in the literature.

A numerical solution of the linear Boltzmann equation using cubic B-splines.

A numerical method using cubic B-splines is presented for solving the linear Boltzmann equation. The collision kernel for the system is chosen as the Wigner-Wilkins kernel. A total of three different representations for the distribution function are presented.