Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

We present the results of an ab initio study of elastic scattering and vibrational excitation of NO by electron impact in the low-energy (0-2 eV) region where the cross sections are dominated by resonance contributions. The 3Sigma-, 1Delta and 1Sigma+ NO- resonance lifetimes are taken from our earlier study [Phys. Rev. A 69, 062711 (2004)], but the resonance energies used here are obtained from new configuration-interaction studies. Here we employ a more elaborate nonlocal treatment of the nuclear dynamics, which is found to remedy the principal deficiences of the local complex potential model we employed in our earlier study, and gives cross sections in better agreement with the most recent experiments. We also present cross sections for dissociative electron attachment to NO leading to groundstate products. The calculations show that, while the peak cross sections starting from NO in its ground vibrational state are very small, the cross sections are extremely sensitive to vibrational excitation of the target and should be readily observable for target NO molecules excited to v = 10 and above.