Wave-packet study of the mutual neutralization processes in low-energy lithium-hydrogen collisions
Phys. Rev. A 112, 052827 – Published 26 November, 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/4tmp-tx56
Abstract
The inelastic processes in low-energy cation-anion lithium-hydrogen collisions are important for accurate determination of lithium abundances in late-type stars, which may be used in a variety of astrophysical phenomena such as Big Bang nucleosynthesis, stars and stellar cluster ages, as well as other stellar and laboratory plasma physics. For these reasons, the titled processes have been intensively treated by both theoretical and experimental methods, including the full-quantum stationary methods based on the numerical solution of the time-independent Schrödinger equation, the nonadiabatic models such as Landau-Zener model, the different experimental techniques, and so on. However, the full-quantum time-dependent approaches have not been employed so far. Since some discrepancies still remain and because of the importance of the titled processes, this paper is addressed to the wave-packet study of low-energy cation-anion lithium-hydrogen collisions, including participation of different hydrogen isotopes. In addition, we have modified the wave-packet method for better calculations of the inelastic transition probabilities.
