Theoretical studies of low energy electron collisions with small molecular clusters

We developed and tested a new approach to treat low energy electron collisions with molecular clusters, called Multiple Scattering, which simplifies the scattering process by dividing the target cluster into molecular sub-units; ab initio methods are employed to calculate collisional data for the el...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Caprasecca, Stefano
Published: Open University 2010
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Online Access:http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.527453
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Summary:We developed and tested a new approach to treat low energy electron collisions with molecular clusters, called Multiple Scattering, which simplifies the scattering process by dividing the target cluster into molecular sub-units; ab initio methods are employed to calculate collisional data for the electron - sub-unit scattering process, which is later combined by the Multiple Scattering method to account for the interference between sub-units. We applied the novel method to the scattering from water and formic acid clusters; the results (cross sections) were compared to other theoretical and experimental results, showing good agreement. The ab initio R-matrix method was employed both for producing the collisional information on the sub-units and also for calculating comparison cross sections where previous results were not available.