Colloquium Announcement

Light ions of lithium, carbon, nitrogen, and inert gases are of particular interest for seeding in plasma to assist in cooling the outermost plasma region and reduce erosion by producing a peripheral radiating mantle in fusion devices, such as ITER and DEMO. These ions get excited by electron impact and subsequently, decay by emitting line radiation in plasma. Spectra of these impurities carry vital information about the plasma properties. Thus, accurate knowledge of electron impact excitation cross-sections and atomic structures of the impurity ions is essential to correctly interpret the spectra so that different approaches to impurity injection can be assessed and predicted. In this connection, I will discuss our group's investigations of atomic-structure parameters and electron-impact excitation between fine-structure levels of inert gas highly charged ions.

Dr. Lalita Sharma did her Ph.D. from IIT Roorkee, Roorkee in Nov 2008 and worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, from Jan 2009 – March 2011. After that, she joined the Department of Physics, IIT Roorkee as Assistant Professor on contract and later on as Assistant Professor from Oct 2012. She has published 50+ research articles in journals of international repute and presented her work at several international conferences in India and abroad. She has supervised 21 master’s theses and two doctoral theses. Her research interests include atomic-structure calculations, electron-impact excitation of atoms/ions and collisional radiative modeling.