Computing the exchange interaction in electron scattering from polyatomic molecules

The treatment of the exchange potential between the bound electrons of a polyatomic target and the continuum electron from the impinging beam employed in single-collision scattering experiments is considered by using different computational approaches. In the relevant experimental setup the impinging electron undergoes single scattering with the gaseous target molecule and only the elastic channel is being considered by the present calculations. The chosen example of the benzene molecule shows that the various modeling of the all-important exchange interaction yield good agreement with the existing experiments and suggest that they could be profitably employed to analyze elastic angular distributions from polyatomic targets of fairly high complexity and fairly large number of bound electrons.