Electron emission in collisions of fast highly charged bare ions with helium atoms

Abstract

We have studied the electron emission from ground state helium atom in collision with fast bare heavy ions at intermediate and high incident energies. In the present study, we have applied the present three-body formalism of the three Coulomb wave (3C-3B) model and the previously adopted four-body formalism of the three Coulomb wave (3C-4B). To represent the active electron in the helium atom in the 3C-3B model, the initial bound state wavefunction is chosen to be hydrogenic with an effective nuclear charge. The wavefunction for the ejected electron in the exit channel has been approximated to be a Coulomb continuum wavefunction with same effective nuclear charge. Effectively the continuum-continuum correlation effect has been considered in the present investigation. Here we have calculated the energy and angular distribution of double differential cross sections (DDCS) at low and high energy electron emission from helium atom. The large forward-backward asymmetry is observed in the angular distribution which is explained in terms of the two-center effect (TCE). Our theoretical results are compared with available experimental results as well as other theoretical calculations based on the plain wave Born approximation (PWBA), continuum-distorted wave (CDW) approximation, continuum-distorted wave eikonal-initial state (CDW-EIS) approximation, and the corresponding values obtained from the 3C-4B model [S. Jana, R. Samanta, M. Purkait, Phys. Scr. 88, 055301 (2013)] respectively. It is observed that the four-body version of the present investigation produces results which are in better agreement with experimental observations for all cases.