Effective potential methods in variational treatments of electron‐molecule collisions. I. Theoretical formulation

Application of the complex Kohn variational method to attosecond spectroscopy

The complex Kohn variational method is extended to compute light-driven electronic transitions between continuum wave functions in atomic and molecular systems. This development enables the study of multiphoton processes in the perturbative regime for arbitrary light polarization. As a proof of principle, we apply the method to compute the photoelectron spectrum arising from the pump-probe two-photon ionization of helium induced by a sequence of extreme ultraviolet and infrared light pulses. We compare several two-photon ionization pump-probe spectra, resonant with the (2s2p) 1P 1 o Feshbach resonance, with independent simulations based on the atomic B-spline close-coupling STOCK code, and find good agreement between the two approaches. This finite-pulse perturbative approach is a step towards the ab initio study of weak-field attosecond processes in polyelectronic molecules.

Dissociative attachment to ClCN and BrCN

We present calculated dissociative attachment cross sections for ClCN and BrCN in the 0-20 eV energy range. In this energy region, both Cl(-)Br(-) and CN(-) fragments are possible and are produced via dissociation along repulsive resonance curves. Electron scattering calculations, using the complex Kohn variational method and molecular structure calculations, were used to determine the three-dimensional surfaces and resonance parameters. The nuclear dynamics was studied in one, two, and three dimensions using time-dependent wave packet methods, employing the multiconfiguration time-dependent Hartree method for multiple dimensions. The calculated cross sections are reported and compared to the available experiments. Couplings between resonance states will also be examined and discussed.