Vibrational Excitation of Hydrogen Molecule by Slow Electrons

Abstract

The Born approximation is applied to the study of relative importance of various parts of the interaction between an incident electron and a hydrogen molecule in exciting vibration of H₂. It is found that the polarization force is most important. Then the distorted wave method is applied to obtain a more reliable cross section. The resulting cross section has a magnitude comparable to experimental data reported by Engelhardt and Phelps and by Schulz. The calculated cross section is finite over the whole energy region beyond the threshold in contrast with Schulz cross section which is negligibly small until the incident energy becomes nearly twice the threshold energy.