Regular Article

Proton impact on ground and excited states of atomic hydrogen

Department of Physics and Astronomy, York University, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada

^a e-mail: tomk@yorku.ca

Received: 4 August 2019
Received in final form: 9 October 2019
Published online: 26 November 2019

Abstract

The processes of electron excitation, capture, and ionization were investigated in proton collisions with atomic hydrogen in the initial n = 1 and n = 2 states at impact energies from 1 to 300 keV. The theoretical analysis is based on the close-coupling two-center basis generator method in the semiclassical approximation. Calculated cross sections are compared with previous results which include data obtained from classical-trajectory Monte Carlo, convergent close-coupling, and other two-center atomic orbital expansion approaches. There is an overall good agreement in the capture and excitation cross sections while there are some discrepancies in the ionization results at certain impact energies. These discrepancies in the present results can be partially understood through the use of a 1/n³ scaling model in the description of electron-capture and target-excitation channels.