De. Atems et Jm. Wadehra, RESONANT CONTRIBUTIONS TO DISSOCIATION OF H2 BY LOW-ENERGY-ELECTRON IMPACT, Journal of physics. B, Atomic molecular and optical physics, 26(21), 1993, pp. 759-765
A resonance theory of electron-impact vibrational excitation of diatom
ic molecules is extended to the case where the final vibrational level
of the molecule lies in the continuum. The extended theory is applied
to resonant dissociation of molecular hydrogen by low-energy electron
impact. Theoretical cross sections for dissociation of ground-state H
-2 via the X 2SIGMA(u)+, and B 2SIGMA(g)+ resonances are presented and
compared with theoretical cross sections obtained by other authors us
ing non-resonant methods. An important aim of the present work is to s
tudy the effect of initial vibrational excitation on the dissociation
cross section. It is found that the B 2SIGMA(g)+ resonance contributes
significantly to the total dissociation cross section for all values
of upsilon(i), for incident energies between 12 eV and 18 eV, while th
e effect of the X 2SIGMA(u)+ resonance becomes appreciable only for la
rger values of upsilon(i).