Electron impact total cross sections for components of DNA and RNA molecules

Abstract

Present paper reports electron impact total cross sections (QT), total elastic cross sections (Qel) and total inelastic cross sections (Qinel) for DNA and RNA nucleic bases as well as Phosphoricacid from 20eV to 2000eV. These components include uracil (C4H4N2O2), thymine (C5H6N2O2), cytosine (C4H5N3O), adenine (C5H5N5), guanine (C5H5N5O) and phosphoric acid (H3PO4). We have employed spherical complex optical potential (SCOP) formalism to calculate these total cross sections. Since DNA and RNA are complex molecules, we have used the group additivity rule which incorporates molecular properties of the target to evaluate these cross sections rather than the atomic properties as in case of independent atom model (IAM) and screened corrected additivity rule (SCAR) employed in previous works. The present results for these complex biomolecules are compared with previous data wherever available.