Electron collisions with ethylene: The role of multichannel-coupling effects

Abstract

We report integral and differential cross sections for elastic and electronically inelastic ($X{\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}}^{1}{A}_{g}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\stackrel{\ifmmode \tilde{}\else \~{}\fi{}}{a}{\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}}^{3}{B}_{1u}$) electron scattering by ethylene. The Schwinger multichannel method with pseudopotentials in the ${N}_{\mathrm{open}}$-channel-coupling scheme at the static-exchange-plus-polarization approximation is employed to calculate the scattering amplitudes at impact energies ranging from 5.7 to 50 eV. We discuss the multichannel-coupling effects in the calculated cross sections, in particular, how the number of excited states included in the open-channel space impacts the convergence of the elastic and the ($X{\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}}^{1}{A}_{g}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\stackrel{\ifmmode \tilde{}\else \~{}\fi{}}{a}{\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}}^{3}{B}_{1u}$) excitation cross sections at higher collision energies. We found good agreement between the present calculated total cross section (which includes elastic, inelastic, and ionization contributions, the latter estimated with the binary-encounter-Bethe model) and the experimental data.