U.S.-Germany Cooperative Research on Heavy Particle IonizingCollision Dynamics

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This award supports Ronald E. Olson, Michael Schulz and two graduate students of the University of Missouri-Rolla to collaborate in atomic physics research with Horst Schmidt-Boecking and his large research group at the Institute for Nuclear Physics of the University of Frankfurt, Germany. These scientists are working with a common goal of understanding ionizing collision systems. However, the Frankfurt and Rolla research groups have different theoretical and experimental strengths, and each laboratory possesses unique equipment that measures complementary and overlapping collision products. Their efforts will be substantially enhanced by sharing their expertise and cooperating in parallel coordinated efforts to achieve the first complete momentum distribution of products in singly ionizing collisions between protons and a Helium target. These data will provide a benchmark for theoretical models at the most fundamental level, and thereby improve understanding of ionizing collisions. As a longer-term goal, the collaborating scientists hope to combine their unique equipment into one experiment. This will enable them to study more complex processes such as multiple ionizations. The microscopic details of ionization induced by fast collisions of ions with atoms are poorly understood, even after decades of study. The problem arises because of the difficulty of formulating theoretical methods to handle the "n-body" collision dynamics and the lack of detailed experimental data to test critically the theoretical models at the most basic level. While the current level of research, such as that proposed here, is very fundamental, it is a necessary prerequisite to models that will have applications in many other fields, such as understanding the microscopic details of cell damage in heavy-particle cancer radiotherapy, or cosmic ray damage to microprocessors in satellite based computers.