Introduction

Abstract

The interaction of charged particles with matter has been an issue of extensive investigations throughout the whole last century. Its theoretical treatment starts with the classical description of the energy loss of fast projectiles considered by Bohr [24]. Later a quantum mechanical treatment of the energy transfer to bound electrons was established by Bethe [18] and refined by Bloch [23]. Further considerable improvements of the theoretical description have been achieved by Fermi and Teller [41] and finally by Lindhard [79]. The present status of the theory has, e.g. been reviewed in the monographs by Sigmund [118, 119]. Till nowadays an enormous number of publications are dedicated to specific questions on the energy loss for a variety of possible projectile and target conditions. Recent applications are the energy transfer to pellets for inertial confinement fusion, electron cooling of heavy ion beams as well as the deceleration of particle beams in traps.