Relativistic effects in high-energy inelastic electron-atom collisions

Abstract

In the approximation that electron-electron interactions at high incident electron energies (≈40 keV) may be taken as coulombic, an expression for the integral inelastic cross section for all inelastic collisions is given for the hydrogen atom and is easily generalizable to more complex atoms. Results are presented which indicate that relativistic effects in the above energy range can amount to upwards of 15% of the nonrelativistic results. For the differential cross sections, it is found that such corrections are most important for small-angle scattering.