Calculations for charge transfer and ionization in heavy-particle collisions from water molecules

Abstract

A recently introduced method for the description of bare ion-molecule collisions is extended to deal with intermediate-energy He+-H2O collisions, in which both the projectile electron and the target electrons are allowed to undergo transitions. All initially populated orbitals are propagated simultaneously using the same effective single-particle Hamiltonian to ensure their orthogonality at all times. The asymptotic solutions are combined to form many-electron transition probabilities on the level of single determinantal wave functions, thereby respecting the Pauli principle. It is shown that this analysis has interesting consequences for capture, loss, and ionization channels.