Differential electron scattering from the (010) excited vibrational mode of N2O

In this letter we report differential superelastic, elastic and inelastic electron scattering measurements from nitrous oxide (N(2)O) in its (010)* excited vibrational quantum. The incident electron energy was 2.5 eV and the scattered electron angular range was 10degrees- 40degrees. Unlike our previous results (1999 J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. 32 5779) with the isoelectronic molecule carbon dioxide (CO(2)), where the elastic differential cross sections (DCSs) for scattering from the (010)* mode were 2.3 times larger than those for elastic scattering from the ground (000) state, in N(2)O the corresponding (010)* elastic cross sections are usually only a fraction of those for the ground state. To the best of our knowledge, the present data are the first DCSs which have been reported in the literature for electron scattering from an excited vibrational level of the N(2)O molecule.