Studies of electron-molecule collisions on distributed-memory parallel computers

We review recent progress in the study of low-energy collisions between electrons and polyatomic molecules which has resulted from the application of distributed-memory parallel computing to this challenging problem. Recent studies of electronically elastic and inelastic scattering from several molecular systems, including ethene, propene, cyclopropane, and disilane, are presented. We also discuss the potential of ab initio methods combined with cost-effective parallel computation to provide critical data for the modeling of materials-processing plasmas