Dissociative attachment of low-energy electrons to vibrationally excited hydrogen molecules

Abstract

Dissociative electron attachment to hot hydrogen molecules is studied in the framework of nonlocal resonance model. The method based on the use of the Bateman approximation, well known in nuclear physics, is adapted for solving the Lippmann-Schwinger integral equation of the nonlocal resonance model and applied to the calculation of cross sections of inelastic resonant electron-molecule collisions. The proposed method is compared with the Schwinger-Lanczos algorithm used extensively for the treatment of these processes. It is shown that the Bateman approximation is very useful and efficient for treating the non-separable nonlocal potentials appearing in the integral kernels of the nonlocal resonance models. The calculated cross sections for the dissociative attachment of electrons to vibrationally excited hydrogen molecules are of importance for astrophysics.