Three-body Coulomb problem probed by mapping the Bethe surface in ionizing ion-atom collisions

Doubly and Triply Differential Cross Sections for Single Ionization of He by Fast Au53+ Using a Multi-Body Quasiclassical Model

A multi-body multi-center quasiclassical model was used to determine doubly- and triply-differential cross sections following single ionization in 3.6 MeV/amu Au53+ + He collisions. The present model improved recent calculations, in which free electrons were added in the collision to reproduce, at least qualitatively, the experimental binary peak. In the present calculations, the electrons, that were assumed to originate from the collisions of Au53+ with surfaces before colliding with the He target, were now considered to be in the field of the projectile, with nearly the same velocity. The agreement between the calculations and the experiment was improved, for both the doubly- and the triply-differential cross sections and was better than previous calculations based on quantum mechanics.

Transverse Momentum Transfer Distributions Following Single Ionization in 3.6 MeV/amu Au53+ + He Collisions: A 4-Body Classical Treatment

A four-body classical model based on the resolution of Hamilton equations of motion was used here to determine and analyze ionization doubly-differential cross sections following 3.6 MeV/amu Au53+ + He collisions. Our calculation was not able to reproduce the binary peaks experimentally observed in the transverse momentum distributions for electron emission energies larger than 10 eV. Surprisingly, by introducing a large number of free or quasi-free electrons that followed the projectile at the same velocity, the agreement between the experiment and our calculation was improved, since our model reproduced, at least qualitatively, the experimental binary peaks. The origin of the presence of such electrons is discussed.

Three-body dynamics in single ionization of atomic hydrogen by 75 keV proton impact

Doubly differential cross sections for single ionization of atomic hydrogen by 75 keV proton impact have been measured and calculated as a function of the projectile scattering angle and energy loss. This pure three-body collision system represents a fundamental test case for the study of the reaction dynamics in few-body systems. A comparison between theory and experiment reveals that three-body dynamics is important at all scattering angles and that an accurate description of the role of the projectile-target-nucleus interaction remains a major challenge to theory.

Extreme sensitivity of differential momentum transfer cross sections to target atom initial conditions

Heavy-particle cross sections differential in the momentum transferred to the target are investigated using the classical trajectory Monte Carlo method. With the 3.6 MeV/mu Au(53+) + He system as a test case, it is shown that these cross sections are extremely sensitive to the initial target temperature. In particular, when thermal motion is varied for one of the target's initial momentum components between 0 and 25 K the absolute cross sections vary by orders of magnitude and, in addition, their relative shapes undergo major changes. We find that by setting one of the target's transverse momenta to a temperature of 16 K, previously reported major discrepancies between theory and experiment are removed.

Correlation quantum dynamics between an electron and D+2 molecule with attosecond resolution

Recently, Niikura et al. [Nature (London) 421, 826 (2003)] have applied the entanglement approach to exploit the correlation between the electronic and nuclear wave packets. Here, we use the time-dependent-wave-packet method to calculate the kinetic energy distribution of the D+ ion resulting from the recollision between an electron and its parent ion D+2(X2Sigma+g) within the attoseconds time scale. Our theoretical results of the D+ ion kinetic energy spectra accord well with the experimental ones, and the recollision probabilities between the electron and the D+2 molecule have been calculated.