Breaking bonds with electrons: Dissociative recombination of molecular ions

We discuss exciting recent progress in the theoretical description of molecular ion dissociative recombination, with further applications to related processes such as molecular photoionization and rovibrationally-inelastic electron collisions with molecular ions. The techniques are based on quantum defect theory, an efficient tool for characterizing electron-ion collision processes, and on a generalized adiabatic formulation. When needed, the approximation of adiabaticity in the dissociative coordinate is lifted by taking non-adiabatic couplings explicitly into account. We concentrate on a time-independent theoretical framework that has been applied to describe dissociative recombination in ions such as H-3(+), its isotopologues (H2D+, D2H+ and D-3(+)), and HCO+ (DCO+). (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.