Projectile electron losses in the collision with neutral targets

An important issue in the acceleration of Uat the forthcoming FAIR/GSI [1] is the projectile electron loss in the collision with the rest gas atoms(molecules). It can lead to degraded focusing and loss of the beam to the walls. These charge-changed fast ions strike the accelerator container walls and give rise to sputtering and activation of the surface. Evidently, it is important to study the interaction of highly charged heavy ions with neutral (rest gas) targets, for practical as well as theoretical reasons. It is a theoretical challenge to treat the many-electron (relativisic) scattering problem in a realistic nonperturbative way. In the spirit of high energy Glauber theory we present a nonperturbative approach for the treatment of single and multiple electron losses of intermediate as well as relativistic highly charged ions colliding with neutral atom targets[2]. We introduce an average impact dependent probabilty p(b) as