Role of the helium ground state in(e,3e)processes

Abstract

Absolute $(e,3e)$ measurements on helium, at high incident energy, have been recently reproduced by a calculation in the first Born approximation [Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 73201 (2003)]. The theoretical model is based on the product of three Coulomb waves for the final state and the use of Pluvinage wave function for the initial helium ground state. The authors suggest that the good agreement obtained is strongly related to the quality of the initial state, in particular to the fact that it is diagonal in all Coulomb interactions. In this paper, we show that this conclusion is not correct. We construct three other helium ground states to demonstrate that diagonalizing the Hamiltonian is not the deciding factor in obtaining agreement with the absolute experimental data.