Quantum mechanical treatment of electron-positron excitations in heavy ion collisions with nuclear contact

A general theory is formulated of electron-positron excitations in heavy ion collisions with nuclear contact, treating the nuclear relative motion quantum mechanically. A set of coupled channel equations for the electronic occupation amplitudes is derived, which is formally very similar to the semiclassical theory based on a classical nuclear trajectory, and reduces to the latter in the JWKB approximation. The new coupled equations contain all the quantum mechanical information on the details of the nuclear scattering during nuclear contact. The importantce of this formulation for a quantitative theory of spontaneous positron creation in supercritical systems with nuclear time delay is pointed out. The possibility of line structures in the positron spectrum, as predicted semiclassically and recently discovered experimentally, is discussed in the framework of the DWBA approximation. For light-particle scattering off a nuclear resonance, the Blair formula for vacancy production is recovered in the same approximation.