Relativistic electron-impact ionization of hydrogen atom from its metastable 2S-state in the symmetric/asymmetric coplanar geometries

TL;DR

This paper analytically calculates relativistic electron-impact ionization cross sections of hydrogen in the metastable 2S-state for symmetric and asymmetric geometries, highlighting relativistic effects at high energies.

Contribution

It provides an analytical, relativistic first Born approximation calculation of ionization cross sections for hydrogen's 2S-state, including relativistic and spin effects at high energies.

Findings

Relativistic and spin effects are significant at high energies.

The nonrelativistic limit is accurately reproduced at low energies.

The analytical approach is compared with nonrelativistic results, but lacks experimental validation.

Abstract

We analytically compute, in the first Born approximation for symmetric and asymmetric coplanar geometries, the triple differential cross sections for electron-impact ionization of hydrogen atom in the metastable 2S-state at both low and high energies. The process is investigated by using the relativistic Dirac-formalism and it is also shown that the nonrelativistic limit is accurately reproduced when using low incident kinetic energies. At high energies, relativistic and spin effects significantly affect the triple differential cross sections. Our analytical approach which seems exact is compared to some other results in the nonrelativistic regime for asymmetric coplanar geometry. For this particular process and in the absence of any experimental data and theoretical models at high energies, we are not in a position to validate our model. We hope that the present study will provide significant contribution to future experiments.