High-Energy Heavy Ions in Crystals

Channeling phenomena have been extensively studied in the last twenty years, and have been shown to be very helpful for the more general study of ion-matter interactions. However, the experimental work has been mostly performed with light projectiles, protons or alpha particles, and also electrons and positrons, over the whole range of available energies, from a few keV to several hundreds of GeV. Channeling investigations with heavy ions have been mainly performed with moderately heavy ions of Tandem energies, that is, between 1 and 3 MeV/u, and particularly by the Oak Ridge group in a nice series of experiments. It can be expected that channeling studies of very fast heavy ions, then in high charge states, will reveal specific properties of their interactions with matter.