An application of the refined born approximation to the solution of coupled equations involved in electron-ion and electron-atom scattering problems

A new approach to the solution of coupled equations involved in electron-ion and electron-atom scattering problems is proposed. This method is a combination of iteration and variation procedures. The main advantage of this method is that exchange terms can be calculated in a direct and straightforward manner. The method is based on the Lippmann-Schwinger equation and does not require trial functions satisfying appropriate boundary conditions. Using the Volterra formulation one can find the solution on an interval determined by the range of the exchange potential and the long-range potential terms can be taken into account by a projection procedure giving the asymptotic value of the reactance matrix. The method is tested on the case of electron-hydrogen atom scattering in the 1s-2s and 1s-2s-2p approximation.We have adapted the method proposed originally by Rayski to obtain solutions of coupled equations involved in electron-ion and electron-atom scattering. As mentioned in section 1 the construction of the method secures an automatic fulfilment of the boundary conditions. It allows an easy calculation of the exchange potential as well as an estimation of the introduced approximation. It gives also a possibility of detecting any spurious convergence. Moreover, it is important that this formalism can be applied in the case of normalized as well as unnormalized initial integral equations. This fact is of special importance in the case of long-range interactions. When the method is used for unnormalized (Volterra) equations it allows application of a very convenient projection procedure for treating the long-range terms in the direct potential.Electron-hydrogen atom collisions are investigated as a numerical illustration of the method. In the 1s-2s approximation the normalized equations were solved, while in the 1s-2s-2p approximation the solution was obtained with the help of Volterra equations and the long-range terms of the direct potential were taken into account by the projection procedure. In both cases the calculations were performed in the first iteration step and the obtained solutions agree fairly well with the results obtained by a numerical integration. It is not clear which set of results is more accurate. The numbers of parameters needed to obtain these results was not too large (not more than twenty in each channel) and decreased with the increase of the values of angular momentum and energy. The calculations were performed without weight functions, although the use of an appropriate weight function can improve the effectiveness of the method. This effectiveness could also be improved through a more lucky choice of trial functions.