Relativistic (e, 2e) collisions on atomic inner shells in symmetric geometry

Abstract

We report here on an (e, 2e) experiment at relativistic electron energies (E0=300 keV and 500 keV) in coplanar symmetric geometry. Absolute triple differential cross section measurements forK-shell ionisation of gold, silver and copper are compared with a number of simple first order approximations. Appreciable discrepancies between theory and experiment are found, which reduce with decreasingZ and increasing primary energy. The theoretical calculations show that spin flip effects are important in symmetric geometry, in earlier works these had been neglected.