Collisional classical dynamics at the quantum scale

Abstract

During the past five decades, classical dynamics have been systematically used to gaininsight on collision processes between charged particles and photons with atomic and moleculartargets. These methods have proved to be efficient for systems in which numerical intensive quantummechanical methods are not yet tractable. During the years, reaction cross sections for chargeexchange and ionization have been scrutinized at the total and differential levels, leading to a clearunderstanding of the benefits and limitations inherent in a classical description. In this work, wepresent a review of the classical trajectory Monte Carlo method, its current status and the perspectivesthat can be envisaged for the near future.