Importance of the recoil contribution in Two Step 2 mechanism for the electron impact double ionization process

The second order, Two-Step-2 (TS2) mechanism for electron impact double ionization (DI) of various targets at intermediate incident energy is investigated based on a kinematical analysis which assumes the DI to result from two successive (e,2e) single ionization (SI) events. The results show that under the present kinematics, the inclusion of the recoil scattering in each of these (e,2e)-SI steps (in previous studies only the binary scattering was considered) allows a more detailed understanding of the various peaks observed in the experimental angular distributions of the ejected electrons in both (e,3-1e) and (e,3e) experiments.