Ab-initio electron scattering cross-sections and transport in liquid xenon

TL;DR

This paper develops ab-initio differential cross-sections for electron scattering in liquid xenon and uses them to accurately predict electron transport properties, aligning well with experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive ab-initio framework for electron-liquid xenon scattering and improves transport property predictions through a novel gas-to-liquid cross-section transformation.

Findings

Transport properties agree within 25% of measurements.

The framework considers multipole polarizabilities and non-local exchange.

A gas-phase based model enhances liquid cross-section accuracy.

Abstract

Ab-initio electron - liquid phase xenon fully differential cross-sections for electrons scattering in liquid xenon are developed from a solution of the Dirac-Fock scattering equations, using a recently developed framework [1] which considers multipole polarizabilities, a non-local treatment of exchange, and screening and coherent scattering effects. A multi-term solution of Boltzmann's equation accounting for the full anisotropic nature of the differential cross-section is used to calculate transport properties of excess electrons in liquid xenon. The results were found to agree to within 25% of the measured mobilities and characteristic energies over the reduced field range of 10^{-4} to 1 Td. The accuracies are comparable to those achieved in the gas phase. A simple model, informed by highly accurate gas-phase cross-sections, is presented to transform highly accurate gas-phase cross-sections to improve the liquid cross-sections, which was found to enhance the accuracy of the transport coefficient calculations.