Calculation of intermediate-energy electron-impact ionization of molecular hydrogen and nitrogen using the paraxial approximation

Abstract

We have implemented the paraxial approximation followed by the time-dependent Hartree-Fock method with frozen core for the single impact ionization of atoms and two-atomic molecules. It reduces the original scattering problem to the five-dimensional time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation solution. By using this method we calculated the multi-fold differential cross section of the impact single ionization of the helium atom, the hydrogen molecule and the nitrogen molecule by the intermediate energy electrons. Our results for the helium and the hydrogen are quite close to experimental data, but for N$_2$ the agreement is worse apparently because of the insufficiency of the frozen core approximation.