Excitation of heavy hydrogenlike ions in relativistic collisions

We study the excitation of heavy hydrogenlike ions occurring in high-energy collisions with many-electron atoms by considering three theoretical approaches. In all of them the initial and final undistorted states of the electron in the ion are described by relativistic Coulomb-Dirac wave functions. In two of these approaches the interaction between the electron of the ion and the atom is described within the first order perturbation theory. In the first approach the presence of the atomic electrons is neglected whereas the second approach takes them into account. The comparison of results of these two approaches allows one to establish the range of collision energies where the effect of the electrons of the atom on the excitation process is weak and can be neglected. At these energies, however, the interaction between the electron of the ion and the nucleus of the atom may become too strong for the first order theory to be a good approximation. In order to deal with this point we present the third approach which is based on the symmetric eikonal approximation. Theoretical results are compared with available experimental data