Electron spin co-orientation in adiabatic atomic collisions

It is shown that inelastic collisions of atoms with unfilled shells are accompanied, in the adiabatic limit, by spin co-orientation of the outer electrons and the electrons from inner shells with vacancies. The co-orientation disappears as the energy increases due to the violation of the adiabatic approximation. The proposed approach explains the experimental data on the fluorescence yield near the threshold for K-vacancy creation in 'N+ + target atom' and 'Ne+ + target atom' collisions. (author)