Compound state resonances in the collinear collision of an atom with a diatomic oscillator

Abstract

Compound state resonance effects are reported in exact, numerical calculations of the collinear collision of a particle with a harmonic oscillator with a Morse interaction potential. They are shown to be due to the formation of a long-lived complex or quasibound state and are much more narrow than resonances reported previously for this type of system. The stable eigenvalues resulting from a variational calculation with a bound state basis set are found to be in excellent agreement with the resonance energies, and such a variational calculation is a good way of locating these resonances.