Electron-impact ionization of water molecules at low impact energies

The electron-impact ionization of water molecules at low impact energies is investigated using a theoretical approach named M3CWZ. In this model, which considers exchange effects and post-collision interaction, the continuum electrons (incident, scattered, and ejected) are all described by a Coulomb wave that corresponds to distance-dependent charges generated from the molecular target properties. Triple differential cross-sections for low impact energy ionization of either the 1b1 or 3a1 orbitals are calculated for several geometrical and kinematical configurations, all in the dipole regime. The M3CWZ model is thoroughly tested with an extensive comparison with available theoretical results and COLTRIMS measurements performed at projectile energies of Ei = 81 eV [Ren et al., Phys. Rev. A 95, 022701 (2017)] and Ei = 65 eV [Zhou et al., Phys. Rev. A 104, 012817 (2021)]. Similar to other theoretical models, an overall good agreement with both sets of measured data is observed for the angular distributions. Our calculated cross-sections' magnitudes are also satisfactory when compared to the other theoretical results, as well as to the cross-normalized relative scale data at 81 eV impact energy. The 65 eV set of data, measured on an absolute scale, offers a further challenging task for theoretical descriptions, and globally the M3CWZ performs fairly well and comparably to other theories. The proposed approach with variable charges somehow allows to capture the main multicenter distortion effects while avoiding high computational costs.