Electron impact excitation of NiII

It is found that the resonance structures of the collision strengths are quite sensitive to the way the pseudo-orbital is created. Further, the close coupling expansion with a single 4d{bar} orbital does not converge, resulting in a poor representation of (N+1)-electrons auto-ionizing states.

Much greater expansions are needed to properly represent resonance structures in electron impact excitation calculations, resulting in variations of up to factors of two, with respect to previous computations, in the Maxwellian averaged excitation rate coefficients.