EXPLICIT DEMONSTRATION OF THE CONVERGENCE OF THE CLOSE-COUPLING METHOD FOR A COULOMB 3-BODY PROBLEM

Convergence as a function of the number of states is studied and demonstrated for the Poet-Temkin model of electron-hydrogen scattering. In this Coulomb three-body problem only the l = 0 partial waves are treated. By taking as many as thirty target states, obtained by diagonalizing the target Hamiltonian in a Laguerre basis, complete agreement with the smooth results of Poet is obtained at all energies. We show that the often-encountered pseudoresonance features in the cross sections are simply an indication of an inadequate target state representation.