Dissociative Recombination of CF$^+$

TL;DR

This study provides a theoretical analysis of the dissociative recombination of CF$^+$ using advanced quantum theories, achieving good agreement with experimental data and highlighting the importance of rotational structure at low energies.

Contribution

It applies the UK R-matrix and multichannel quantum-defect theories to model CF$^+$ DR, offering a comprehensive approach that bypasses explicit dissociative state calculations.

Findings

Good agreement with experimental measurements at low energies when including rotational structure.

Rotationally resolved results are similar at higher energies regardless of rotational structure inclusion.

The approach effectively resolves direct and indirect DR mechanisms without explicit dissociative state calculations.

Abstract

This work presents our theoretical study of the dissociative recombination (DR) of the closed-shell diatomic system CF$^+$ based on an approach recently applied to the CH$^+$ molecule. Our extended treatment uses the UK R-matrix theory and the multichannel quantum-defect theory procedure to uniformly resolve the direct and indirect mechanisms of DR while bypassing explicit dissociative state and electronic coupling calculations. The theoretical results exhibit good overall agreement with previous experimental measurements. At lower scattering energies, good agreement is found only if the rotational structure of the ion is included and the theoretical cross sections are averaged over initial rotational levels corresponding to the temperature at which the experimental measurements were made. At higher scattering energies, our rotationally resolved results are very similar to those obtained without including the ion's rotational structure.