Theoretical studies of low energy electron collisions with small molecular clusters

Abstract

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