Excitation processes as a pathway for electron solvation in non-polar liquids

Abstract

The possibility for solvation of an electron in a non-polar liquid by an excitation collision is considered in the context of capture into natural fluctuations. We focus on liquid methane as input data is readily available, although our method is easily extended to other species. We adapt our previous work, which found that sound mode excitations in atomic fluids could allow for trapping of electrons in weak fluctuations, to consider incoherent excitations as the trapping mechanism. These excitations present opportunities for solvation to occur at higher energies, around the threshold energies of the excitation processes. The rates we obtain for solvation in liquid methane are weak, due to the low abundance of fluctuations supporting bound states. The formalism presented here is aimed at providing an ab-initio energy-discriminant description, in contrast to an empirical time-scale, for modelling solvation of electrons in applications such as plasma exposure of water or biological bodies.