Raman association of H2 in the early universe.
We investigate the contribution made by Raman scattering to the formation of molecular hydrogen in astrophysical environments characteristic of the early stages of the evolution of the universe. In the Raman process that we study, a photon is scattered by a pair of colliding hydrogen atoms leaving a hydrogen molecule that is stabilized by the transfer of kinetic and binding energy to the photon. We use a formulation for calculating the photon scattering cross section in which an infinite sum of matrix elements over rovibrational levels of dipole accessible electronic states is replaced by a single matrix element of a Green's function. We evaluate this matrix element by using a discrete variable representation.
van der Loo
Mark P J
MP
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Groenenboom
Gerrit C
GC
Jamieson
Michael J
MJ
Dalgarno
Alex
A