This award supports Professor Walter Meyerhof of Stanford University for collaborative research in physics with Professor Joerg Eichler of the Hahn-Meitner Institute, Berlin, Germany. Professor Meyerhof and his group at Stanford have been studying atomic collision processes at high energy, mainly experimentally, in order to understand inner-shell electronic and radiative processes occurring during an atomic collision. They have collaborated for many years with specialists in Europe and Latin America. The main line of their experimental research is shifting now from the intermediate velocity to the extreme relativistic domain, in partnership with Dr. Harvey Gould of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. In parallel with this experimental work, collaboration with theoretical physicists will be essential to provide the deep understanding necessary for relativistic processes. Professor Eichler offers crucial theoretical expertise in the mechanisms of electron capture and in atomic collision processes at relativistic velocities. To provide a good basis for their future work, Professors Eichler and Meyerhof are collaborating on a monograph that will discuss the theoretical approaches which have been used to date to treat relativistic atomic collisions and provide details about experimental techniques and results.
