Relaxation of hot and massive tracers using numerical solutions of the Boltzmann equation

A numerical method using B-splines is used to solve the linear Boltzmann equation describing the energy relaxation of massive tracer particles moving through a dilute bath gas. The smooth and rough hard sphere and Maxwell molecule models are used with a variety of mass ratios and initial energies to test the capability of the numerical method. Massive tracers are initialized with energies typically found in energy loss experiments in mass spectrometry using biomolecules. The method is also used to examine the applicability of known expressions for the kinetic energy decay from the Fokker-Planck equation for the Rayleigh gas, where we find that results are generally good provided that the initial energy is properly bounded. Otherwise, the energy decay is not constant and a more complex behaviour occurs. The validity of analytical expressions for drag coefficients for spherical particles under specular and diffuse scattering is also tested. We find such expressions are generally good for hard spheres but cannot account, as expected, for the softer repulsive walls of the Maxwell (and real) molecules. Overall, the numerical method performed well even when tracers more than 400 times as massive as the bath were initialized with energies very far from equilibrium. This is a range of applicability beyond many of the standard methods for solving the Boltzmann equation.