Kinematically complete study of low-energy electron-impact ionization of argon: Internormalized cross sections in three-dimensional kinematics

As a further test of advanced theoretical methods to describe electron-impact single-ionization processes in complex atomic targets, we extended our recent work on Ne(2p) ionization [X. Ren, S. Amami, O. Zatsarinny, T. Pfluger, M. Weyland, W. Y. Baek, H. Rabus, K. Bartschat, D. Madison, and A. Dorn, Phys. Rev. A 91, 032707 (2015)] to Ar(3p) ionization at the relatively low incident energy of E-0 = 66 eV. The experimental data were obtained with a reaction microscope, which can cover nearly the entire 4 pi solid angle for the secondary electron emission. We present experimental data for detection angles of 10, 15, and 20 degrees. for the faster of the two outgoing electrons as a function of the detection angle of the secondary electron with energies of 3, 5, and 10 eV, respectively. Comparison with theoretical predictions from a B-spline R-matrix (BSR) with pseudostates approach and a three-body distorted-wave (3DW) approach, for detection of the secondary electron in three orthogonal planes as well as the entire solid angle, shows overall satisfactory agreement between experiment and the BSR results, whereas the 3DW approach faces difficulties in predicting some of the details of the angular distributions. These findings are different from our earlier work on Ne(2p), where both the BSR and 3DW approaches yielded comparable levels of agreement with the experimental data.