THREE-PARTICLE RECOMBINATION AT LOW TEMPERATURE: A QED APPROACH |
| S. Bhattacharyya and A. Roy Department of Physics, Gokhale Memorial Girls' College Calcutta-700020, India |
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| Received: February 26, 2001; revised version May 23, 2001 |
| A theoretical study of the three-body recombination of proton and electron in presence of a spectator electron with electronic beam at near-zero temperature is presented using field theory and invariant Lorentz gauge. Contributions from the Feynman diagrams of different orders give an insight into the physics of the phenomena. Recombination rate coefficient is obtained for low lying principal quantum number n=1 to 10. At a fixed ion beam temperature (300 K) recombination rate coefficient is found to increase in general with n, having a flat and a sharp peak at quantum states 3 and 5, respectively. In absence of any other theoretical and experimental results for low temperature formation of H-atom by three-body recombination at low lying quantum states, we have presented the theoretical results of Stevefelt and group for three-body recombination of deuteron with electron along with the present results. Three-body recombination of antihydrogen in antiproton--positron plasma is expected to yield similar result as that for three-body recombination of hydrogen formation in proton--electron plasma. The necessity for experimental investigation of low temperature three-body recombination at low quantum states is stressed. |
| DOI: 10.12693/APhysPolA.100.23 PACS numbers: 32.80.Fb, 33.55.Ad |