Relativistic cross sections for excitation of highly charged ions to specific magnetic sublevels by an electron beam

A program has been developed for making calculations of fully relativistic distorted-wave cross sections for excitation of highly charged ions to specific magnetic sublevels Mf by a beam of electrons. The approach uses the same Dirac-Fock-Slater potential for all electrons and is expected to be accurate for nuclear charge number Z{}2.5N, where N is the number of bound electrons per ions. To our knowledge there is at present no other fully relativistic program available with which we could compare results for this type of cross section. However, the present results for He-like, Li-like, and Ne-like iron and for Ne-like molybdenum are compared with other partially relativistic results, and generally good agreement is obtained for these ions. It is expected that the present program will be useful for comparison with and interpretation of experimental results for very highly charged ions, such as those obtained in electron-beam ion-trap experiments at Livermore [R. E. Marrs et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 60, 1715 (1988)].