Nuclear and Non-Ionizing Energy-loss of Electrons with Low and Relativistic Energies in Materials and Space Environment

TL;DR

This paper extends the electron-nucleus interaction model to include effects like screened Coulomb potentials and finite nuclear sizes, enabling accurate calculations of stopping powers and non-ionizing energy loss across a wide energy range in materials and space environments.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive model for electron-nucleus interactions that accounts for finite nuclear size, mass, and screening effects, improving accuracy at high energies.

Findings

Stopping power underestimates if nuclear size and mass are neglected.

Finite nuclear size limits the increase of stopping power at high energies.

Accurate NIEL calculations are possible across a broad energy spectrum.

Abstract

The treatment of the electron-nucleus interaction based on the Mott differential cross section was extended to account for effects due to screened Coulomb potentials, finite sizes and finite rest masses of nuclei for electrons above 200 keV and up to ultra high energies. This treatment allows one to determine both the total and differential cross sections, thus, subsequently to calculate the resulting nuclear and non-ionizing stopping powers. Above a few hundreds of MeV, neglecting the effect due to finite rest masses of recoil nuclei the stopping power and NIEL result to be largely underestimated; while, above a few tens of MeV the finite size of the nuclear target prevents a further large increase of stopping powers which approach almost constant values.