# Bolsig

BOLSIG+ is a user-friendly Windows application for the numerical solution of the Boltzmann equation for electrons in weakly ionized gases in uniform electric fields, conditions which typically appear in the bulk of collisional low-temperature plasmas. Under these conditions the electron distribution is determined by the balance between electric acceleration and momentum loss and energy loss in collisions with neutral gas particles. The main purpose of BOLSIG+ is to obtain the electron transport coefficients and collision rate coefficients from collision cross section data. The principles of BOLSIG+ can be summarized as follows: the Electric field and all collision probabilities are assumed to be uniform; the angular dependence of the electron distribution is approximated by the classical two-term expansion; the change in the electron number density due to ionization or attachment is accounted for by an exponential growth model; using the above assumptions, the Boltzmann equation reduces to a convection-diffusion continuity-equation with a non-local source term in energy space, which is discretized by an exponential scheme and solved for the electron energy distribution function by a standard matrix inversion technique.

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