In this project in the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Professor McCurdy plans to investigate what happens when electrons collide with molecules, as well as what happens to atoms when they are placed in stong electric or magnetic fields. A range of studies (including electronic excitation, dissociation, and vibrational excitation by electron impact) of collisions of electrons with polyatomic molecules will be performed on small polyatomic molecules. The investigations will be based on the complex Kohn variational approach, and the efforts will be focused on intrinsically polyatomic phenomena and on systems which are important for plasma applications. The same computational methods will be used to study the dynamics of atoms in intense fields, where the field destroys the symmetry of the atomic problem.
