Glory undulations in the total cross section for scattering of heavy rare gas atoms

In a supersonic molecular beam apparatus the velocity dependence of the total cross section for scattering of argon and krypton beams by argon, krypton and xenon has been measured for relative velocities ranging from 0.55 to 4.30 km · s^-1. For all these systems a number of glory extrema were well resolved. The measured cross sections are compared with cross sections calculated on the basis of recently proposed pair potentials. For the systems Ar-Ar, Kr-Kr and Ar-Kr the glory structure is fairly well described by the potentials, however, the energy dependence of the cross sections is not. The available potentials for the systems Ar-Xe and Kr-Xe describe the glory structure less accurately. Rather severe changes of the potentials will be required to obtain agreement with the total cross section data. A qualitative analysis of the required changes is presented.