Comment on "Dynamics of transfer ionization in fast ion-atom collisions"

TL;DR

This paper critically examines a recent theoretical model of transfer ionization in ion-atom collisions, demonstrating that it is a subset of an established approximation and providing numerical evidence against its unique predictions.

Contribution

The authors clarify that the proposed electron-electron capture scenario is part of the existing Oppenheimer-Brinkmann-Kramers approximation and refute its distinctiveness through numerical analysis.

Findings

The scenario is a subset of the Oppenheimer-Brinkmann-Kramers approximation.

Numerical calculations show no significant evidence of the proposed mechanism.

The study clarifies the theoretical understanding of transfer ionization processes.

Abstract

We inspect the first-order electron-electron capture scenario for transfer ionization that has been recently formulated by Voitkiv et al. (Phys. Rev. A 86, 012709 (2012) and references therein). Using the multichannel scattering theory for many-body systems with Coulomb interactions, we show that this scenario is just a part of the well-studied Oppenheimer-Brinkmann-Kramers approximation. Accurate numerical calculations in this approximation for the proton-helium transfer ionization reaction exhibit no appreciable manifestation of the claimed mechanism.