Calculation of double differential cross sections of electron–atom bremsstrahlung by the relativistic partial-wave method at electron energies greater than 3 MeV

Abstract

This work describes an extension of the relativistic partial-wave (PW) method for calculation of the double differential cross sections (DDCS) of electron–atom bremsstrahlung at incident electron energies (T1) of the order of 10 MeV. The PW method is extended to higher energies by replacing some of the radial matrix elements with interpolated values, and by extrapolating the truncated PW series to a sufficiently high value of the maximum total angular momentum of the electron (jmax). Although the current analysis has been mostly limited to the cases with the outgoing electron energy T2≤10MeV and all values of Z from 1 to 100, this method allows to obtain accurate values of the DDCS even when T2>20MeV, using a relatively small number of partial waves (jmax<300), as demonstrated by a case study described in the present work (Z=1, T1=30MeV, T2=24MeV).