Scale transformations in model exchange potentials in low energy electron-atom scattering

Abstract

Model exchange potentials are particularly interesting to account for the indistinguishability between the projectile and target electrons in electron-atom scattering in vacuo and plasma environments. It is well known that their performance is pretty satisfactory in the high energies but also that discrepancies from the results obtained with exact exchange are found toward the zero energy limit. In this article, we examine how well established model exchange potentials based on the free electron gas approach compare to phase shifts calculated considering exchange in exact form. In particular, we show that the Hara and the semiclassical exchange potentials are able to reproduce reference low energy phase shifts through a simple scale transformation, in opposition to the previous approaches where energy dependent corrections to the local momentum were adopted. We provide the scale factors and phase shifts for electron scattering by He, Ne and Ar atoms for $k<$ 1,0 a${}_0^{-1}$. Such scaling factors can be determined reproducing the scattering length and the number of s-wave bound states from exact exchange calculations. We also show that the scaling procedure works for electronic densities that present the physically correct asymptotic behavior. The present results are important to the research field, since they form the basis to construction of scattering models based on optical potential approaches.