The Few-Body Coulombian Problem

Recent advances in the treatment of scattering of charged composite particles are reviewed. In a first part I report on developments of the theory. Specifically I describe the recent completion of the derivation of the co-ordinate space asymptotic behaviour of the wave function for three charged particles in the continuum. This knowledge is increasingly being made use of in attempts to `derive' three-Coulomb particle wave functions to be used in all of configuration space which are solutions of the Schroedinger equation, though not everywhere but at least in one or preferably all of the asymptotic regions. Their practical application in approximate calculations of ionisation and breakup processes is pointed out. The asymptotic three-charged particle wave functions find further use in investigations of asymptotic and analytic properties of matrix elements of the three-body Coulomb resolvent. An important example is the nonperturbative derivation, valid for all energies, of the large-distance behaviour of the optical potential. In the second part I describe renewed attempts to establish the few-body approach as a valuable tool for calculating (energetic) atomic collision processes. At the end I briefly touch upon the recent successful above-breakup-threshold calculation of proton-deuteron elastic scattering for a realistic potential