Scaled Born cross sections for excitations of H2 by electron impact

This article describes the scaling of plane-wave Born cross sections for the excitation of the H(2) molecule to four low-lying electronic states (B (1)Sigma(u) (+), C (1)Pi(u), B(') (1)Sigma(u) (+), and D (1)Pi(u)) by electron impact. The same BE and BEf scaling methods used on atoms were found to be equally effective for H(2) in converting Born cross sections into cross sections in good agreement with available experiments. These scaling methods are applicable only to dipole-allowed excitations. The possibility of using these scaling methods, as was done in atoms, to estimate the contribution of inner-shell excitations to the total ionization cross section via the excitation-autoionization mechanism is discussed, though this type of indirect ionization in molecules is not as common as in atoms.