Studies of electron collisions with polyatomic molecules using distributed-memory parallel computers

Elastic electron scattering cross sections from 5–30 eV are reported for the molecules C_2H_4, C_2H_6, C_3H_8, Si_2H_6, and GeH_4, obtained using an implementation of the Schwinger multichannel method for distributed‐memory parallel computer architectures. These results, obtained within the static‐exchange approximation, are in generally good agreement with the available experimental data. These calculations demonstrate the potential of highly parallel computation in the study of collisions between low‐energy electrons and polyatomic gases. The computational methodology discussed is also directly applicable to the calculation of elastic cross sections at higher levels of approximation (target polarization) and of electronic excitation cross sections

Studies of electron-molecule collisions on distributed-memory parallel computers

We review recent progress in the study of low-energy collisions between electrons and polyatomic molecules which has resulted from the application of distributed-memory parallel computing to this challenging problem. Recent studies of electronically elastic and inelastic scattering from several molecular systems, including ethene, propene, cyclopropane, and disilane, are presented. We also discuss the potential of ab initio methods combined with cost-effective parallel computation to provide critical data for the modeling of materials-processing plasmas