Resonance effects in projectile-electron loss in relativistic collisions with excited atoms

Abstract

The theory of electron loss from projectile-ions in relativistic ion–atom collisions is extended to the case of collisions with excited atoms. The main feature of such collisions is a resonance which can emerge between electron transitions in the ion and atom. The resonance becomes possible due to the Doppler effect and has a well-defined impact energy threshold. In the resonance case, the ion–atom interaction is transmitted by the radiation field and the range of this interaction becomes extremely long. Because of this the presence of other atoms in the target medium and the size of the space occupied by the medium have to be taken into account and it turns out that microscopic loss cross sections may be strongly dependent on such macroscopic parameters as the target density, temperature and size. We consider both the total and differential loss cross sections and show that the resonance can have a strong impact on the angular and energy distributions of electrons emitted from the projectiles and the total number of electron loss events.