Electron-Atom interaction potential by DCS minimization

Abstract

The angular and energy dependence of minima of the differential scattering cross section (DCS) for electrons scattered elastically by selected target atoms is studied using the nonrelativistic Hartree–Fock wavefunction for the static field and local energy-dependent function for the exchange and polarization potentials for the target atoms. The parameters contained in the polarization potential are varied to determine the minima of the DCS with respect to the scattering angle and incident energy with the constraint that the integral cross section agrees with the experimental value within the uncertainty of 5% at a selected energy. The resulting effective interaction potential is then used to compute the DCS over the intermediate energy range for the target atoms. The computed values are in good agreement with recently published experimental and theoretical cross section for helium and neon atoms.