Electron Scattering by Tetrahydrofuran Molecules: Elastic and Electronically Inelastic Interactions

We report elastic and electronically inelastic cross sections for scattering of electrons with energies up to 30 eV by the tetrahydrofuran molecule in the gas phase. The calculations were performed by using the Schwinger multichannel method implemented with norm-conserving pseudopotentials. We analyzed five distinct scattering models to explore the impact of multichannel coupling effects on the description of elastic and electronically inelastic collisions, each incorporating a different channel coupling scheme. Our computed elastic cross sections exhibit strong agreement with existing experimental data. The present results exhibit three resonances of the π*─character and the respective positions are in excellent agreement with the literature. For electronically inelastic processes, we find that the number of coupled channels is the dominant factor in suppressing cross-section magnitudes, with exhaustive channel coupling providing the most rigorous benchmark for these previously uncharacterized individual excitation channels.