Abstract
Total cross sections have been measured for the production of the metastable 1s3 and 1s5 states in neon at incident electron energies from threshold to 500 eV. A time of flight technique was used to determine relative cross sections which were made absolute by comparison with the known cross sections for metastable production in helium. Reasonable agreement is found between the present results and those of Phillips et al. (1981) who used different techniques to measure relative cross sections and to normalise their data. This good agreement has implications for the mechanism of the excitation of the metastable states.