Theory of dissociative recombination: Overview and recent progress

A new generation of experiments on dissociative recombination using ion storage rings, extending over a broad energy range, has revealed a number of features that require substantial extensions of existing theoretical treatments. We briefly review the various mechanisms and present the main directions in which theory is being developed, as an introduction to the theoretical papers in this volume. Directions for future studies will be outlined, in particular for the energy and angular distributions of fragments resulting from dissociative recombination.