Pair creation in heavy ion channeling

Heavy ions channeled through crystals with multi-GeV kinetic energies can create electron–positron pairs. In the framework of the ion, the energy of virtual photons arising from the periodic crystal potential may exceed the threshold 2mec22mec2. The repeated periodic collisions with the crystal ions yield high pair production rates. When the virtual photon frequency matches a nuclear transition in the ion, the production rate can be resonantly increased. In this two-step excitation-pair conversion scheme, the excitation rates are coherently enhanced, and scale approximately quadratically with the number of crystal sites along the channel.