Collisional Depolarization Rates for C2 Solar Molecular Lines
Quantum coupled-channel scattering calculations, built on ab initio potential energy surfaces, that yield the rates at which isotropic collisions with neutral hydrogen destroy or redistribute the polarization of C2 molecular lines in the solar photosphere. The rates are expressed in an irreducible spherical-tensor basis and fitted analytically in temperature and molecular angular momentum, and they show lower-state polarization is only partially quenched, so it cannot be neglected in Hanle-effect magnetic-field diagnostics.
2501.00763
Collisions with neutral hydrogen atoms partly destroy the polarization imprinted on molecular spectral lines, which complicates using those lines to measure solar magnetic fields via the Hanle effect…