  Studies of meteor trails have until now been limited to relatively simple
models, with the trail often being treated as a conducting cylinder, and the
head (if considered at all) treated as a ball of ionized gas. In this article,
we bring the experience gleaned in other fields to the domain of meteor
studies, and adapt this prior knowledge to give a much clearer view of the
microscale physics and chemistry involved in meteor-trail formation, with
particular emphasis on the first 100 or so milliseconds of the trail formation.
We discuss and examine the combined physico-chemical effects of
meteor-generated and ablationally amplified cylindrical shock waves which
appear in the ambient atmosphere immediately surrounding the meteor train, as
well as the associated hyperthermal chemistry on the boundaries of the high
temperature postadiabatically expanding meteor train. We demonstrate that the
cylindrical shock waves produced by overdense meteors are sufficiently strong
to dissociate molecules in the ambient atmosphere when it is heated to
temperatures in the vicinity of 6,000 K, which substantially alters the
considerations of the chemical processes in and around the meteor train. We
demonstrate that some ambient O2, along with O2 that comes from the shock
dissociation of O3, survives the passage of the cylindrical shock wave, and
these constituents react thermally with meteor metal ions, thereby subsequently
removing electrons from the overdense meteor train boundary through fast,
temperature independent, dissociative recombination governed by the second
Damkohler number. Possible implications for trail diffusion and lifetimes are
discussed.
