A natural potential surface dissection technique for molecular scattering

This paper is concerned with the dissection of general potential scattering surfaces in a way that takes into account their natural contour structure. In this fashion, the scattering problem can be broken into a set of pieces based on the slowly varying nature of the potential surface along its natural contours. The boundary integral method is used to represent the solution in each subregion in terms of its value and normal derivative along the subregion boundaries. A simple illustrative example was considered based on direct numerical solutions of the resulting algebraic equations. For efficient treatment of realistic problems, we also show how previously developed R -matrix theory ideas may be readily applied in the present circumstances.