Coherent Coulomb excitation of relativistic nuclei in aligned crystal targets
V. R. Zoller
Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics, 117218 Moscow, Russia
PACS: 25.75.-q
Abstract
We study coherent Coulomb excitation of
ultrarelativistic nuclei passing through the aligned crystal target.
We develop multiple scattering theory description of
this process which consistently incorporates both the
specific resonant properties of particle-crystal interactions and the
shadowing effect
typical of the diffractive scattering.
We emphasise that the effect of quantum mechanical diffraction
makes the physics of ultrarelativistic nuclear excitations entirely
different from the physics of non-relativistic atomic excitations
experimentally studied so far.
It is found that
at small transverse momenta
the shadowing effect drastically changes
the dependence of coherent amplitudes on the
crystal thickness L,
from the widely discussed
growth
typical of the
Born approximation to
the inverse thickness attenuation law.
At relatively large
no attenuation effect is found but
the coherency condition is shown to put stringent constrain on the growth
of the transition rate with growing L.