Effect of electron-nuclei interaction on internuclear motions in slow ion-atom collisions

Abstract

The electron-nuclei interaction affects the internuclear motion in slow ion-atom collisions, which in turn affects theoretical results for the cross sections of various collision processes. The results are especially sensitive to the details of the internuclear dynamics in the presence of a strong isotope effect on the cross sections, as is the case, e.g., for the charge transfer in low-energy collisions of ${\text{He}}^{2+}$ with H, D, and T. By considering this system as an example, we show that internuclear trajectories defined by the Born-Oppenheimer (BO) potential in the entrance collision channel, which effectively accounts for the electron-nuclei interaction, are in much better agreement with trajectories obtained in the ab initio electron-nuclear dynamics approach [R. Cabrera-Trujillo et al., Phys. Rev. A 83, 012715 (2011)] than the corresponding Coulomb trajectories. We also show that the use of the BO trajectory instead of the Coulomb trajectory in the calculations of the charge-transfer cross sections within the adiabatic approach improves the agreement of the results with ab initio calculations.