Elastic scattering of quasifree electrons on fully stripped and one-electron ions

Abstract

The so-called binary encounter electron peak corresponding to elastic scattering of 'quasifree' electrons in energetic ion-atom collisions is studied experimentally at zero degree. It was previously observed that the yield of binary encounter electrons goes up with the number of ion-core electrons for a fixed nuclear charge. In order to study this effect in more details this work is focused on collisions involving hydrogen-like and fully stripped incident ions where an unambiguous comparison with theory can be made. When normalized to the case of fully stripped incident ions it is found that the yield of binary encounter electrons for one-electron ions varies slowly with collision energy and nuclear charge. The experimental results agree well with the theory.