Elastic scattering of electrons by silicon, germanium and tin tetrahalides

Highlights: • Quantum mechanical approach to find elastic CS by e⁻ impact. • Modified Spherical complex optical potential formalism used to find the CS. • Result shows reasonable agreement with previous QT results with consistent behaviour. • Maiden attempt to find elastic and total CS for many tetrahalide molecules. • Halogenation effect is interpreted by the variation of ratio of cross sections. - Abstract: This article reports the elastic collision cross section for the tetrahedral compounds of silicon, germanium and tin by intermediate to high energy (20–5000 eV) electrons. The calculations were carried out using a quantum mechanical approach called spherical complex optical potential (SCOP) formalism. Under the same frame work the total scattering cross section has been also studied. Among the studied molecules, the total scattering cross sections for SiCl₄ and GeCl₄ by electrons has been compared with available experimental values. For all other molecules the elastic and total cross sections are reported for the first time. We have also investigated the halogenation effect by comparing the ratio of cross sections for different halides.