Stopping power of fast channeled protons in Hartree-Fock approximation

Abstract

The electronic energy loss of MeV-protons in crystals is investigated in the Hartree-Fock approximation for the core electrons of the target. It turns out that each core electron can be regarded as stopping the proton independent of all other electrons without restriction by the Pauli principle. For the channeling stopping power the impact parameter dependent energy loss of a proton moving rectilinearly past a crystal ion is calculated in first Born approximation. Low excitations of the core electrons lead to a long range impact parameter dependence, whereas high excitations contribute to the energy loss proportional to the electron density sampled along the proton trajectory. The results are applied to 4 MeV proton channeling along the main channels of Si using Clementi wave functions for the core electrons and a free electron approximation for the valence electrons. The comparison with the experimental results of Clarket al. yields good agreement. In the high velocity limit a reduction of the channeling stopping power to 0.64(0.83) of the random value is predicted for Si(C).