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Volume 13: Pages 377-388, 2000
Hyperspherical Waves and the Motion of Charged Particles
J. H. Macek 1,2
1Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee 37996‐1501 U.S.A.
2Oak Ridge National Laboratory, P.O. Box 2009, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37831 U.S.A.
The correlated motion of charged particles underlies the structure of atoms, molecules, and solids. Fano and coworkers have proposed a very general microscopic picture to understand the static and dynamical properties of such charged‐particle aggregates. Propagation of a hyperspherical wave from a condensation region to a far region is the central concept in this picture. We articulate a quantitative theory of this wave propagation. Our approach employs adiabatic wave‐functions in an unconventional way to compute multichannel wave‐functions. This method decouples the adiabatic parameter ρ from the physical hyperspherical coordinate R. This allows the freedom to represent both bound and continuum channels, a feature missing in the usual hyperspherical close‐coupling method. Some surprising predictions emerge from this theory. Alternative ab initio calculations support these results for a few systems. Ionization cross sections for one of these model systems are computed and compared with essentially exact results of other workers.
Keywords: electron, correlation, ionization, hyperspherical, adiabatic, wave, capture
Received: May 8, 2000; Published online: December 15, 2008
