Protonium formation in the p̅ -H collision at low energies by a diabatic approach

We present a diabatization technique in combination with the recently developed hyperspherical close coupling (HSCC) method. In contrast to the strict diabatization, our simple diabatization procedure transforms only sharp avoided crossings in the adiabatic hyperspherical potential curves into real crossings. With this approach, the weak collision channels can be removed from the close-coupling calculations. This method is used to study the antiproton-hydrogen collision at low energies. In the case of a scaled down (anti)proton mass, we show that a 10-channel calculation is enough to obtain converged cross sections at low energies. The results also indicate that protonium formation occurs mostly to the lowest states of the different excited protonium manifolds.