Saturation Effect of Projectile Excitation in Ion–Atom Collisions

Abstract

Calculations of projectile K-shell electron excitation cross sections for He-like ions during ion-atom collisions have been performed in the distortion approximation by the use of Herman-Skillman wave functions. The calculated results are compared with the experimental data for several targets. The excitation cross sections deviate from the first-Born approximation and show the saturation effect as a function of target atomic number. This effect can be explained as the distortion of the projectile electronic states by the target nucleus.