A relativistic description of the polarization mechanism of elastic bremsstrahlung

Abstract

A completely relativistic mechanism for describing polarization bremsstrahlung caused by an elastic collision of a charged particle with a many-electron target was suggested. Multipole expansions for the amplitude and cross section of the process taking into account radiation lag effects were obtained. Including higher order multipoles was shown to result in substantial asymmetry of the angular distribution of emitted photons compared with the dipole case and in a noticeable change in the spectral characteristics of polarization radiation. The cross section of polarization bremsstrahlung was found to increase logarithmically as the energy of incident particles grew.