Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

We report the results of {\em ab initio} calculations on dissociative electron attachment (DEA) to water that demonstrate the importance of including three-body breakup in the dissociation dynamics. While three-body breakup is ubiquitous in the analogous process of dissociative recombination, its importance in low-energy dissociative electron attachment to a polyatomic target has not previously been quantified. Our calculations, along with our earlier studies of DEA into two-body channels, indicate that three-body breakup is a major component of the observed O- cross section. The local complex potential model provides a generally accurate picture of the experimentally observed features in this system, reproducing some quantitatively, others qualitatively, and one not at all.