Abstract
The physics of elementary atomic processes in relativistic collisions between highly-charged ions and atoms or other ions is briefly discussed, and some recent theoretical and experimental results in this field are summarized. They include excitation, capture, ionization, and electron-positron pair creation. The numerical solution of the two-center Dirac equation in momentum space is shown to be a powerful nonperturbative method for describing atomic processes in relativistic collisions involving heavy and highly-charged ions. By propagating negative-energy wave packets in time the evolution of the QED vacuum around heavy ions in relativistic motion is investigated. Recent results obtained from numerical calculations using massively parallel processing on the Cray-T3E supercomputer of the National Energy Research Scientific Computer Center (NERSC) at Berkeley National Laboratory are presented.
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