A semiclassical approximation in inelastic ion-atom collisions

The impact-parameter dependence of atomic excitation in collisions with charged heavy projectiles is obtained from the full treatment of inelastic scattering processes in a semiclassical approximation. It is demonstrated that the semiclassical result obtained from the plane-wave Born approximation is identical to the first-order perturbation result based on classical straight-line trajectories for the motion of the projectile relative to the target nucleus.