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arXiv · 1411.5711

Pair creation in heavy ion channeling

Nikolay A. Belov·Zoltán Harman
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Abstract

Heavy ions channeling through crystals with multi-GeV kinetic energies can create electron-positron pairs. In the framework of the ion, the energy of virtual photons arising from the periodic crystal potential may exceed the threshold $2mc^2$. The repeated periodic collisions with the crystal ions yield high pair production rates. When the virtual photon frequency matches a nuclear transition in the ion, the production rate can be resonantly increased. In this two-step excitation-pair conversion scheme, the excitation rates are coherently enhanced, and they scale approximately quadratically with the number of crystal sites along the channel.

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Nikolay A. Belov, Zoltán Harman. 2014-11-20. Pair creation in heavy ion channeling. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2016.01.064

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