Effect of initial-state target polarization on the single ionization of helium by 1-keV electron impact

Abstract

We report new results of triple differential cross sections for the single ionization of helium by 1-KeV electron impact at the ejection energy of 10 eV. Investigations have been made for both the perpendicular plane and the plane perpendicular to the momentum transfer geometries. The present calculation is based on the three-Coulomb wave function. Here we have also incorporated the effect of target polarization in the initial state. A comparison is made between the present calculation with the results of other theoretical methods and a recent experiment [Dürr M, Dimopoulou C, Najjari B, Dorn A, Bartschat K, Bray I, Fursa D V, Chen Z, Madison D H and Ullrich J 2008 Phys. Rev. A 77 032717]. At an impact energy of 1 KeV, the target polarization is found to induce a substantial change of the cross section for the ionization process. We observe that the effect of target polarization plays a dominant role in deciding the shape of triple differential cross sections.