Relativistic antihydrogen production by pair production with positron capture

Abstract

Antihydrogen atoms may rarely be produced by the collision of antiprotons with ions. At relativistic velocities the antiproton may pass around the Coulomb field of the nucleus and the electron-positron pairs can be produced electromagnetically. After this pair production not so often positron can be captured by the antiproton and as a result antihydrogen atoms may be produced. In this work we have calculated the antihydrogen production cross section in the framework of perturbation theory by applying Monte-Carlo integration techniques. In order to compute the lowest-order Feynman diagrams amplitudes we used Darwin wave functions for the bound states of the positrons and Sommerfeld-Maue wave functions for the continuum states of the electrons. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.