Compton ionization of atoms as a method of dynamical spectroscopy

•A new method of dynamical spectroscopy.•Compton ionization of atoms.•formulating conditions for new experiments. In a recent paper published in the journal Nature physics [1], a possibility to measure the fully differential cross section of the reaction of single Compton ionization of a helium atom without detecting the scattered photon has been demonstrated. A comparison of the experimental data with the theory based on the Kramers-Heisenberg-Waller model has shown a good applicability of this model to the case of low (of the order of several keV) photon energies. In the present paper, the possibility of using such reactions for studying the momentum distribution of the active electron in the target atoms is discussed in more detail. We also make a comparison of Compton momentum spectroscopy method with widely known electron momentum spectroscopy.