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Charge exchange in dense plasmas can result in dips in spectral line profiles of hydrogenlike ions of a nuclear charge Z perturbed by fully-stripped ions of a different nuclear charge Z' ≠ Z. These so-called x-dips were described in detail theoretically and discovered experimentally in our previous works. In the theoretical part of the present paper we show that the x-dip has a structure consisting of the dip itself surrounded by two adjacent bumps. We also show that two different explanations of the x-dip formation, provided in the previous papers, do not describe the same processes: they represent two independent mechanisms working simultaneously. Based on the obtained results, we provide for the first time a method for determining the rate coefficients of charge exchange from the measured shape of the x-dips, namely, from the bump-to-dip ratio of intensities. In the experimental part we present new results on the x-dips in the profile of the Lγ line of Al XIII in a laser-produced plasma. These new experimental data, obtained with a significantly better spectral resolution than in our previous experiments, allow observation for the first time not just of the dip itself (the central minimum), but the entire structure including two adjacent bumps. By combining our new theoretical and experimental results, we determined for the first time the rate coefficient of charge exchange between the hydrogenic Al and a fully-stripped C in the laser-produced plasma. This constitutes the next step towards the employment of the x-dip phenomenon for producing not-yet-available fundamental data on charge exchange between multicharged ions, virtually inaccessible by other experimental methods.
Dalimier et al. (Mon,) studied this question.