Electron collisions with formic acid

We report elastic, electronically inelastic, total ionization and total cross sections for the scattering of electrons by trans-formic acid. The calculations of the elastic and electronically inelastic cross sections were performed with the Schwinger multichannel method implemented with norm-conserving pseudopotentials. The electronically inelastic calculations were done within the minimal orbital basis for single configuration interaction approach with different multichannel coupling schemes considering from 1 up to 51 open channels, which enable us to study the influence of the multichannel coupling effects on the calculated cross sections. Polarization effects in the elastic channel were taken into account considering only the excitations related to the pairs used in the minimal orbital basis for single configuration interaction approach. We found that the magnitude of the elastic and inelastic cross sections decreases as more channels are treated as open in the scattering calculations. The calculated elastic differential cross sections present an overall good agreement with previous studies found in the literature. The elastic integral cross section presents a well-known pi* shape resonance centered at 1.96 eV. The total ionization cross section was calculated with the binary-encounter-Bethe model and presents a good agreement with previous results from the literature. The total cross section was estimated using the calculated elastic, inelastic and ionization cross sections.