Electronic excitation of Ar atoms to metastable states and from metastable to higher states

The formation of the metastable states 3p 54s of the Ar atom by an electron impact and the electronic excitation from these states to the higher levels 3p 54p ArI are investigated in detail. The electronic excitation cross sections are determined based on a previously proposed approach to generalization of experimental and theoretical results. The method proposed consists in interpolation over the entire set of cross sections for each of the investigated levels of the Ar atom (measured by us previously or taken from the literature) using the four-parameter approximation of the dependences of the cross sections on the energy of incident electrons.