Stochastic theory of molecular collisions. II. Application to atom-vibrotor collisions

In this work stochastic theory is applied to the treatment of atom-vibrotor collisions. This is an extension of a previous paper which described molecular collisions by a Pauli master equation or a Fokker-Planck equation. In this framework an energy conserving classical path model is explored, and methods for solving the equations numerically are discussed. The coefficients of the Fokker-Planck equation are shown to be expressible as simple functions of the interaction potential. Estimates of the computational labor are also discussed. Finally as a followup on the initial work, numerical solutions of the master equation for the collinear vibrational excitation problem of Secrest and Johnson are presented in an Appendix.