Dimesoatom breakup in the Coulomb field

Abstract

Momentum and angular distributions of charged meson pairs $h^{+}{h}^{-}$ ($h=\pi ,K$) from elementary atoms (EA) breakup (ionization) in the Coulomb field of a target atom is considered in the Born and Glauber approximations. Exploiting the fact that the atomic screening of the target Coulomb potential is important at small transfer momenta, while multi-photon exchanges are essential at large transfer momenta we express the cross sections of EA breakup as a sum of two terms. In the region of modest transfer momenta the cross section is determined by the single-photon exchange (first Born approximation) accounting for the target atoms screening, whereas at large transfer momenta using the unscreened potential allows to take into account all multi-photon exchanges and obtain the cross section of EA breakup in the close analytical form.

Comments: 8 pages, 6 figures, PDFLaTeX