Vibrational excitation of water by low-energy electron scattering: calculations and experiments

Vibrationally inelastic cross-sections of the water molecule by low-energy electron collisions are computed by solving the rigorous vibrational coupled channel (VCC) equations within a body-fixed (BF) formulation. The results have been obtained down to very low energies above the threshold openings for the three normal modes of the target. A comparison with existing experiments, and with the most recent calculations, clearly shows the good agreement with measurements achieved by our present results, especially at collision energies of less than 1 eV never analysed in previous work. (authors)