The concept of dominant interaction hamiltonians is introduced and applied to classical planar electron-atom scattering. Each trajectory is governed in different time intervals by two variants of a separable approximate hamiltonian. Switching between
them results in exchange of energy between the two electrons. A second mechanism condenses the electron-electron interaction to instants in time and leads to an exchange of energy and angular momentum among the two electrons in form of kicks. We calculate the approximate and full classical deflection functions and show that the latter can be interpreted in terms of the switching sequences of the approximate one. Finally, we demonstrate that the quantum results agree better with the approximate classical dynamical results than with the full ones.
