Elastic and excitation cross sections for electron-formaldehyde collisions

Differential and momentum-transfer cross sections for elastic e(-)-CH2O sca ttering in the 16-80 eV as well as differential and integral cross sections for the X(1)A(1) --> (a) over tilde (3)A(2) excitation by electron impact in the 20-80 eV range are reported. The Schwinger variational iterative met hod is applied to solve the elastic scattering equations, whereas the disto rted-wave approximation combined with that method is applied to calculate c ross sections for the inelastic process. There is a good agreement between our excitation cross sections with other theoretical data available in the literature. This comes in support of the reliability of our results for the elastic process. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.