F.A. Gianturco

Department of Chemistry, The University of Rome “La Sapienza” and INFM,
Piazzale A. Moro 5, 00185 Rome, Italy.

Electron beams have been used over the years for the study of a very broad variety of molecular properties, ranging from the fundamental study of low-energy resonances, electron-induced molecular fragmentation, excitation, dissociative attachment and recombination to the analysis of plasma production by electrons and of chemical vapour deposition initiated by electron impact [1].

Likewise, positrons have been widely used both for probing gas properties at the molecular level [2] and for their use in several applied field related, for example, to defects in solids and to polymer formation [3].

In the present talk I shall endeavour to show that the theoretical understanding of such processes and the computational modelling of the relevant observables has also made good progress in recent years and that we are now able to gather a great deal of data which pertain to simple systems and also to analyse with good reliability the behaviour of complex gases like fullerenes or biomolecular targets [4,5].
 

References
[1] Fundamental Electron Interactions with Plasma Processing Gases, L.G. Christophorou, J.K. Olthoff Ed.s, Kluwer Academic, New York (2004)
[2] New directions in Antimatter Chemistry and Physics, C.M. Surko and F.A. Gianturco Ed.s, Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht (2001)
[3] Positron annihilation in semiconductors, R. Krause-Rehberg and H.S. Leipner Ed.s, Springer Verlag , Berlin (1999)
[4] Computational Methods for Electron-Molecule Collisions, W.M.Huo and F.A. Gianturco Ed.s, Plenum Press, New York (1995)
[5] A. Grandi, F.A. Gianturco and N. Sanna, Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 0481013 (2004)