Agreement at last: an experimental and theoretical study on the single ionization of helium by fast proton impact

Abstract

Even though ion/atom-collision is a mature field of atomic physics great discrepancies between experiment and theoretical calculations are still common. Here we present experimental results with highest momentum resolution on single ionization of helium induced by 1\,MeV protons and compare these to different theoretical calculations. The overall agreement is strikingly good and already the first Born approximation yields good agreement between theory and experiment. This has been expected since several decades, but so far has not been accomplished. The influence of projectile coherence effects on the measured data is shortly discussed in line with an ongoing dispute on the existence of nodal structures in the electron angular emission distributions.

15 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Semiclassical description of the kinematically complete experiments
• Transfer excitation reactions in fast proton-helium collisions

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Fully differential cross sections for singly ionizing 1-Mev p+He collisions at small momentum transfer: Beyond the first Born approximation
• Relativistic calculations of differential ionization cross sections: Application to antiproton-hydrogen collisions
• Controlling electron projectile coherence effects using twisted electrons
• Fully differential cross sections for $L{i}^{2+}$-impact ionization of $Li(2s)$ and $Li(2p)$