Regular Article

Electron impact elastic scattering from methane and silane molecules

¹ Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India
² Department of Physics and Astronomy, York University, Toronto, Canada

^a e-mail: rajsrfph@iitr.ernet.in

Received: 31 January 2019
Revised: 21 June 2019
Published online: 27 August 2019

Abstract

Analytical expressions for the static potentials of the electron scattering from methane (CH₄) and silane (SiH₄) molecules have been obtained using Gaussian wave functions. Subsequently, we have studied the elastic scattering of electrons from these molecules utilizing their static potentials along with exchange and polarization potentials as well as a purely imaginary absorption potential to represent scattering into inelastic channels. The multi-centre target molecules are represented as STO-6G Gaussian wave functions. We have calculated the differential, integrated and momentum transfer cross sections in a wide range of incident electron energies from 10 to 500 eV. Comparisons of our results for CH₄ and SiH₄ with the available measurements and theoretical results are presented.