A practical approach to temperature effects in dissociative electron attachment cross sections using local complex potential theory

We propose a practical computational scheme to obtain temperature dependence of dissociative electron attachment cross sections to polyatomic molecules within a local complex potential theory formalism. First we perform quantum path-integral molecular dynamics simulations on the potential energy surface for the neutral molecule in order to sample initial nuclear configurations as well as momenta. Classical trajectories are subsequently integrated on the potential energy surface for the anionic state and survival probabilities are simultaneously calculated along the obtained trajectories. We have applied this simple scheme to dissociative electron attachment processes to H2O and CF3Cl, for which several previous studies are available from both the experimental and theoretical sides. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.