Abstract
The subject of electronic excitation in ion-atom collisions has a longstanding history and still continues to be one of the most active fields of research in atomic physics. Any attempt to give in the present chapter a complete survey of this subject would be a hopeless task. Accordingly, the selection of the material discussed here has been guided solely by the author’s personal interests and by the desire to address, to a certain extent, topics that bear a direct relation to the title of this volume, that is, coherence in atomic collision physics. Strictly speaking, the wave-mechanical nature of atomic physics entails any collision process to be at least partially coherent. In most situations, however, this coherence is not directly reflected in the observed features of the collision. Our aim therefore is to emphasize those cases in which coherence properties of the collision are explicitly revealed, e.g., through interference effects due to the (coherent) superposition of contributions to the excitation amplitude from different excitation mechanisms. Following the author’s inclination, a major part of the specific examples considered deals with inner-shell processes in heavy-ion-atom collisions.
Published Version
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