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

该奖项支持Ronald E. Olson、Michael Schulz和密苏里大学罗拉分校的两名研究生与德国法兰克福大学核物理研究所的Horst Schmidt-Boecking及其大型研究小组在原子物理研究方面的合作。这些科学家的共同目标是了解电离碰撞系统。然而，法兰克福和罗拉的研究小组有着不同的理论和实验优势，每个实验室都拥有独特的设备来测量互补和重叠的碰撞产物。通过分享他们的专业知识，并在平行协调的努力中合作，他们的努力将大大加强，以实现质子和氦靶之间单电离碰撞中产品的第一个完整的动量分布。这些数据将在最基本的层面上为理论模型提供基准，从而提高对电离碰撞的理解。作为一个长期目标，合作的科学家们希望将他们独特的设备结合到一个实验中。这将使他们能够研究更复杂的过程，如多重电离。即使经过几十年的研究，人们对离子与原子的快速碰撞引起的电离的微观细节仍然知之甚少。这一问题的产生是因为很难制定处理“n体”碰撞动力学的理论方法，并且缺乏详细的实验数据来在最基本的水平上对理论模型进行严格的检验。虽然目前的研究水平，如这里提出的，是非常基础的，但它是将在许多其他领域应用的模型的必要先决条件，例如了解重粒子癌症放疗中细胞损伤的微观细节，或宇宙射线对卫星计算机微处理器的损伤。

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.