Determination of the scattering length for Rb-Cs X$^{1}Σ^{+}$ ground electronic state using a variational method
We performed the calculation of the scattering length for the elastic collision between the rubidium and cesium atoms. For this we applied a variational procedure based on the R-matrix theory for unbound states employing the finite element method (FEM) for expansion of the wave-function in terms of a finite set of local basis functions. The FEM presents as advantages the possibility of the development of a efficient matrix inversion algorithm which significantly reduces the computation time to calculate the R matrix. We also tested a potential energy curve with spectroscopic accuracy obtained before from a direct adjustment procedure of experimental data of the $X^{1}Σ^{+}$ state based on genetic algorithm. The quality of our result was evaluated by comparing them with several ones previously published at literature.