A study of the polarization interaction with application to low-energy electron-H collisions.

The need for an understanding of the polarization interaction is discussed, and a procedure for calculating the electron-H(, 2) polarization potential based on a molecular structure code formulation of the problem is developed. In our treatment, nonadiabatic effects are approximated by a cutoff procedure which involves the numerical computation of certain integrals. Polarization potentials in which various multipole contributions were retained are presented. Scattering results in which the polarization interaction is represented by our calculated potentials are found to be in excellent agreement with a variety of recent experimental measurements. The possibility of extending this ab initio treatment of the polarization potential to include other electron-molecule systems is discussed