The Distorted-Wave Born Approach for Calculating Electron-Impact Ionization of Molecules

Abstract

The distorted-wave Born approximation (DWBA) has been one of the most successful theoretical approaches for treating electron collisions with complicated atoms, and recently the DWBA has been successfully extended to treat electron-impact ionization of molecules. The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of that development and to provide a summary of the recent experimental and theoretical works examining low to intermediate energy electron-impact single ionization of molecules.