Collisions and Stopping of Fast Charged Particles in Matter

Abstract

This text is intended to offer a consistent presentation of the theory of collisions and stopping of charged particles in matter, limited to the range of intermediate kinetic energies where atomic aggregation effects are relatively unimportant and processes such as the creation of particle-antiparticle pairs are not likely to occur. The first three Chapters contain introductory material on the classical description of electromagnetic fields in matter, an overview of quantum wave equations for a particle in a central potential, and an account of elementary atomic-structure models. Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to the classical and quantum theories of elastic collisions of charged particles with atoms. The theory of inelastic collisions and stopping is split into two parts: first, collisions with atoms are considered within the plane-wave Born approximation in Chapter 6, which includes a derivation of the Bethe stopping power formula; second, the theory of inelastic collisions in dense materials is based on the dielectric formalism, which is formulated for the electron gas, and extended to arbitrary materials by means of optical-data models in Chapter 7. Chapter 8 offers a detailed review of the theory of stopping, starting with the classical study by Bohr and ending with derivations of the Bloch and Barkas corrections to the stopping power. Chapter 9 deals with general aspects of transport theory, including derivations of energy-straggling distributions and multiple-scattering distributions, which are the basis for condensed simulation schemes of charged particle transport. Finally, Chapter 10 describes the Fortran programs elastic and sbethe, which implement the main theoretical models presented in the preceding Chapters and are distributed as ancillary information.