X-Ray Processes in Heavy-Ion Collisions

During the past decade, heavy-ion accelerators have become increasingly available to the atomic physics community. Within the past five years, extensive measurements on high-energy atomic collisions using the heaviest possible collision partners have been carried out. Although some of the features exhibited by the lighter encounters simply scale uniformly with increasing atomic number Z (Meyerhof et al., 1977a; Mokler et al., 1978, 1983), the large Coulomb fields associated with the heaviest collision systems induce extensive relativistic effects which result in qualitatively new phenomena. Information gathered through studies of lower-Z encounters has provided the framework within which these high-Z relativistic effects can be understood.