Molecular constants of LiCl(X¹Σ⁺) and elastic collisions of two ground-state Cl and Li atoms at low and ultralow temperatures

Interaction potentials for LiCl(X¹Σ⁺) are constructed by the highly accurate valence internally contracted multireference configuration interaction in combination with a number of large correlation-consistent basis sets, which are used to determine the spectroscopic parameters (D₀, D_e, R_e, ω_e, ω_eχ_e, B_e and α_e). The potentials obtained at the basis sets, i.e., aug-cc-pV5Z-JKFI for Cl and cc-pV5Z for Li, are selected to study the elastic collision properties of Li and Cl atoms at the impact energies from 1.0 × 10⁻¹² to 1.0 × 10⁻⁴ a.u. The derived total elastic cross sections are very large and almost constant at ultralow temperatures, and their shapes are mainly dominated by the s-partial wave at very low impact energies. Only one shape resonance can be found in the total elastic cross sections over the present collision energy regime, which is rather strong and obviously broadened by the overlap contributions of the abundant resonances coming from various partial waves. Abundant resonances exist for the elastic partial-wave cross sections until l = 22 partial waves. The vibrational manifolds of the LiCl(X¹Σ⁺) molecule, which are predicted at the present level of theory and the basis sets cc-pV5Z for Li and the aug-cc-pV5Z-JKFI for Cl, should achieve much high accuracy due to the employment of the large correlation-consistent basis sets.