Collision Integrals for Transport in Plasmas: The Phenomenological Approach

The accuracy of transport properties, essential to the characterization of technological plasmas of interest in many fields, relies on the fundamental information about the collision integrals for the binary interactions in the system. The phenomenological approach has been demonstrated to provide a very useful theoretical framework for the derivation of transport cross sections, and in turn collision integrals, by a physics-sound description of the chemical species interaction. The features of the method and its validation are here briefly reviewed and the impact of the recent generalization of the correlation formulas on collision integrals for interactions involving Si species is estimated.