Adiabatic and post-adiabatic hyperspherical treatment of the huge ungerade proton-hydrogen scattering length

While the hydrogen molecular ion is the simplest molecule in nature and very well studied in all of its properties, it remains an interesting system to use for explorations of fundamental questions. One such question treated in this study relates to finding an optimal adiabatic representation of the physics, i.e. the best adiabatic description that minimizes the role of nonadiabatic effects. As a test case explored here in detail, we consider the ungerade symmetry of H₂⁺, which is known to have a huge scattering length of order 750 bohr radii, and an incredibly weakly bound excited state. We show that a hyperspherical adiabatic description does an excellent job of capturing the main physics. Our calculation yields a competitive scattering length and shows that nonadiabatic corrections are small and can even be adequately captured using the post-adiabatic theory of Klar and Fano.