An ab initio investigation for elastic and electronically inelastic electron scattering from para-benzoquinone

We report the results of ab initio calculations for elastic scattering and also for excitation of individual electronic states of para-benzoquinone (pBQ) by the impact of low-energy electrons. The calculations for elastic scattering were performed with the Schwinger multichannel method implemented with pseudopotentials (SMCPP) in the static-exchange (SE) plus polarization (SEP) approximation for energies up to 50 eV. The assignments for the resonance spectrum obtained in this study are, in general, in good agreement with previous results available in the literature. For electronic excitation by electron impact, the SMCPP method with N energetically open electronic states (Nopen), at either the static-exchange (Nopench-SE) or the static-exchange-plus-polarisation (Nopench-SEP) approximation, was employed to calculate the scattering amplitudes using a channel coupling scheme that ranges from the 1ch-SEP up to the 89ch-SE level of approximation, depending on the energy of interest. Integral cross sections (I...