An ab initio, momentum-space optical potential for electron-molecule scattering

The polarization potential describing the effect of higher reaction channels on electron-molecule elastic scattering is approximated by an ab initio equivalent-local potential. It is added to the exact static-exchange potential for a momentum-space calculation of e^--H₂ scattering. The static-exchange-optical (SEO) model which results is implemented for the selected incident energies 5, 10, 30 and 80 eV for the hydrogen molecule. Differential and integrated elastic cross sections are compared with available experimental data.