On the resonant coherent excitation of relativistic heavy ions

New accelerator facilities open up an interesting new field of experiments on basic channeling as well as on atomic and nuclear resonant coherent excitation (RCE) of heavy ions penetrating through aligned crystals at relativistic energies. Results of computer simulations are presented to characterize the resonant coherent excitation of atomic levels of relativistic hydrogen-like heavy ions. Nuclear resonant coherent excitation reveals interesting different characteristics compared to the corresponding atomic excitation inside crystals. An important result of our model calculations is that poorly-channeled ions have a higher nuclear excitation probability than well-channeled ions.