Please note that this website is a beta release and is still subject to active development. Therefore not all data is available yet and from time to time this website might be offline or show irregular behaviour.

About this website

Photodissociation and photoionization are major destruction processes of molecules in any astrophysical region where ultraviolet photons penetrate, including diffuse and translucent clouds, dense PDRs, the surface layers of protoplanetary disks, and cometary and exoplanetary atmospheres.

This website provides the basic molecular data needed to compute photodestruction rates in various environments, with references to the original sources of the cross section data. Only species for which laboratory or theoretical data are available have been included. Overview papers describing the methods, cross section data and an assessment of the accuracy of the photorates are provided.

News

1. All the plots have changed! We now use linear interpolation instead of splines. As you are probably aware, our implementation of splines gave strange results from time to time. The calculation of the rates has not changed, we already used linear interpolation there before! If you find any peculiar plot please let us know!
2. More updates will follow

What can I find here?

1. All the data files and data format
2. Figures displaying the cross section
3. Rates for various radiation fields, and depth dependence
4. Overview papers with references to cross section data
5. IDL code for calculating the rates and creating the figures

Contact information

This website is still in development. For questions about cross sections, contact Ewine van Dishoeck; for questions or suggestions for the website, please contact Sander de Kievit.

Citation

When using material from this site, please cite one of the overview papers. In cases of specific molecules, please cite the original source of the cross sections as appropriate.