Electron impact excitation from the initially excited cadmium atom

•We apply fully relativistic distorted wave theory for electron-cadmium atom excitation.•We consider excitation from initially excited cadmium atom.•Results are reported for the differential and integrated cross sections in the range of 10–400 eV incident electron energies.•We compare our calculation with other theoretical and experimental results.

Recently applied relativistic distorted wave approximation theory to study electron impact excitation from the ground states of two valence electron atoms viz. Zn and Yb has been extended to study the electron impact excitation of Cd atom from its lowest excited fine structure states. Results have been calculated for differential as well as integrated cross sections. For comparison, the integrated cross section results are also calculated using available flexible atomic code. Both the calculations are then compared with the available experimental results. In general, reasonable agreement among the theoretical and experimental results has been found.

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