Radiative electron capture by relativistic heavy ions

Good agreement with recent experiments is found for photoemission rates and angular distributions. Our results for helium and beryllium targets indicate that the photon spectrum is rather insensitive to target structure, but strongly dependent on multiple-scattering corrections, and this contradicts other recent theoretical predictions. In asymmetric collisions our results are in broad agreement with experiment and relativistic impulse approximation (RIA) calculations. Through detailed analysis of magnetic transitions in terms of the electron and photon polarization correlation parameters, important new features are introduced and discussed.