Applications of the Schwinger multichannel method in elastic collisions of slow-electrons with the benzoic acid molecule

Abstract

We report integral, momentum transfer, and differential cross sections for elastic electron scattering by benzoic acid. The scattering calculations were performed by using the Schwinger multichannel method in the static-exchange and static-exchange plus polarization approximations for impact energies ranging from 0.1 to 15 eV. Since benzoic acid is polar, it is necessary to account for the long-range potential, which was done through Born-closure procedure. Our calculations revealed the presence of four π∗ resonances, in which the three low-lying ones are associated with a shape character, while the higher-lying resonance has a mixed character of shape and core-excited shape resonances. The positions of these resonant structures were compared with electron transmission spectroscopy results from Scheer et al. [J. Phys. Chem. A 118(35), 7242–7248 (2014)]. We also suggest a correlation between the dissociative electron attachment spectrum reported by Zawadzki et al. [J. Chem. Phys. 152(17), 174304 (2020)] and the π∗ resonances obtained in the present work.