Collective field effects in electron - atom scattering in a low-frequency laser field

Abstract

Several recent papers have examined the theory of electron - atom scattering in a low-frequency laser field. Only one of these papers obtained rough agreement with the size of the experimental cross section through the identification of a novel physical process: collective field effects. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that an error in the formulation led to an overestimate of the interaction potential by five orders of magnitude. The experimental results cannot be explained by collective field effects.