Three-body breakup in dissociative electron attachment to the water molecule

We report the results of ab initio calculations on dissociative electron attachment to water that demonstrate the importance of including three-body breakup in the dissociation dynamics. While three-body breakup is ubiquitous in the analogous process of dissociative recombination, its importance in low-energy dissociative electron attachment to a polyatomic target has not previously been quantified. Our calculations indicate that three-body breakup is a major component of the observed O^- cross section. Our studies suggest that the local complex potential model provides a generally accurate picture of the experimentally observed features in this polyatomic system.