Complete Solution of Electronic Excitation and Ionization in Electron-Hydrogen Molecule Scattering

Abstract

The convergent close-coupling method has been used to solve the electron-hydrogen molecule scattering problem in the fixed-nuclei approximation. Excellent agreement with experiment is found for the grand total, elastic, electronic-excitation, and total ionization cross sections from the very low to the very high energies. This shows that for the electronic degrees of freedom the method provides a complete treatment of electron scattering on molecules as it does for atoms.

Low-energy electron scattering from molecular hydrogen: Excitation of the X1Σg+ to bZawadzki1, Wright2, Dolmat3 et al. 2018Phys. Rev. A

“…eV by Hargreaves et al [30] at E 0 values of 14 eV to 17.5 eV, i.e. lower than the E 0 values in [31], resulted in better agreement with the recent CCC model [16] for the excitation of the…”

“…For many transitions and collision processes the CCC results [16,17] proved to be in significant disagreement with recommended cross sections. Particularly disturbing was the disagreement for electron-impact dissociation of H 2 into H atoms.…”

“…Similar to the experimental electron-H 2 data set, only fragmentary theoretical electron-impact cross section data were available, often with unqualified uncertainties and large discrepancies between various theoretical models and with experiment. This changed with the extension of the convergent close-coupling (CCC) method to electron collisions with molecules [13,14,15], and production of the first comprehensive theoretical data set of accurate e --H 2 cross sections [16,17,18]. A distinctive feature of the CCC cross section data set was an explicit demonstration of convergence and an estimate of an accuracy of better than 16% for most transitions.…”

Electron-impact ionization of H2O at low projectile energy: Internormalized triple-differential cross sections in three-dimensional kinematics

“…In recent years, theory has made tremendous progress in describing the electron-impact ionization dynamics of simple atoms and molecules, see e.g. [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. Much more challenging, however, is the treatment of more complex targets, like heavy atoms and molecules.…”

Solving close-coupling equations in momentum space without singularities for charged targets

“…Collisions involving electron, positron, or photon scattering on few-electron atoms and ions can now be routinely calculated accurately at any energy of interest. The CCC approach has also been recently extended to molecular targets [9] and heavy projectiles like antiprotons and protons [10][11][12][13][14].…”