Eur. Phys. J. D 47, 335-338 (2008)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2008-00056-8

Ionization of sodium by the impact of alpha particle

¹ Department of Physics, Surendranath College, Kolkata, 700009, India
² Department of Physics, Charu Chandra College, 22, Lake Road, Kolkata, 700029, India
³ School of Mathematics and Physics, Queen's University, Belfast BT7 INN, Northern Ireland, UK
⁴ Department of Theoretical Physics, Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science Jadavpur, Calcutta, 700032, India
⁵ Department of Physics, Clark Atlanta University, Atlanta, GA, 30314, USA

Corresponding author: ^a n.deb@qub.ac.uk

Received: 3 December 2007
Published online: 4 April 2008

Abstract

A one channel distorted wave approximation has been used to calculate the ionization cross section for the 3s electron of Na atom by alpha particle impact. For a consistency check we have also run the standard CDW-EIS code of McSherry et al. [Comput. Phys. Commun. 155, 144 (2003)] and found reasonable agreement in the high energy region among the present results, the CDW-EIS results and the classical trajectory Monte Carlo (CTMC) calculations. It is also found that the present results tend to agree qualitatively with the low energy measurement of Knoop et al. [J. Phys. B 38, 1987 (2005)] at as low as 10 keV amu^-1, although the present theoretical approach is expected to be suitable in the high energy area. This qualitative agreement in the low energy region is attributed to the partially correlated ground state wave function used in the present calculation.