Effect of positron-atom interactions on the annihilation gamma spectra of molecules

Calculations of γ-spectra for positron annihilation on a selection of molecules, including methane and its fluoro-substitutes, ethane, propane, butane and benzene are presented. The annihilation γ-spectra characterise the momentum distribution of the electron–positron pair at the instant of annihilation. The contribution to the γ-spectra from individual molecular orbitals is obtained from electron momentum densities calculated using modern computational quantum chemistry density functional theory tools. The calculation, in its simplest form, effectively treats the low-energy (thermalised, room-temperature) positron as a plane wave and gives annihilation γ-spectra that are about 40% broader than experiment, although the main chemical trends are reproduced. We show that this effective 'narrowing' of the experimental spectra is due to the action of the molecular potential on the positron, chiefly, due to the positron repulsion from the nuclei. It leads to a suppression of the contribution of small positron-nuclear separations where the electron momentum is large. To investigate the effect of the nuclear repulsion, as well as that of short-range electron–positron and positron–molecule correlations, a linear combination of atomic orbital description of the molecular orbitals is employed. It facilitates the incorporation of correction factors which can be calculated from atomic many-body theory and account for the repulsion and correlations. Their inclusion in the calculation gives γ-spectrum linewidths that are in much better agreement with experiment. Furthermore, it is shown that the effective distortion of the electron momentum density, when it is observed through positron annihilation γ-spectra, can be approximated by a relatively simple scaling factor.