Proton stopping power of aluminum ions

Abstract

With the use of the generalized-oscillator-strength formulation of the plane-wave Born approximation, the contribution of individual subshell ionization and excitation to the proton stopping power is calculated for Al/sup n/+ (0< or =n< or =11) for proton energies between 0.1 and 100 MeV. The neutral-Al results are in excellent agreement with experiment. The subshell-peak stopping power due to ionization is in excellent agreement with scaled neutral-atom values. The optical oscillator strength was used to calculate the Bethe mean-excitation energy I for all the Al ions. Equating the explicitly calculated stopping power at 100 MeV to the Bethe formula led to an alternative I value. While the two I values agreed for some ions, for others they disagreed by as much as 50%. However, even in such cases, a change of less than 10% in the stopping power at 100 MeV would produce agreement between the two methods of calculating I.