The influence of stopping power on the ionisation quench factor

Stopping power values for high energies have been computed applying the first Born approximation and the Bethe formula. However, this approximation tends to overestimate these cross sections at low energies, reaching discrepancies on the order of 50% at energies below 1 keV for most of the molecular targets of interest. In this paper we propose a method to obtain accurate low energy stopping powers of electrons by combining total cross section measurements with a theoretical treatment of the elastic process. We determine the optimum value of the kB parameter of ionisation quenching for the stopping power obtained in this paper.