Towards a fast calculator for the radiation characteristics of radiative recombination and radiative electron capture

Abstract The radiative capture of free electrons (radiative recombination) and bound electrons (radiative electron capture) are among the most important charge changing processes for fast, highly-charged ions. While total cross sections can be obtained by an approximate formula with reasonable accuracy, the estimation of angular distributions and polarization properties of the emitted radiation requires a fully relativistic treatment that is numerical expensive. Therefore we recently started the development of a fast calculator for these radiation characteristics. The program is based on a grid of rigorously calculated data points for free- electron capture into bare ions, between which interpolation is performed to obtain radiation characteristics for specific collision systems. Also capture into few-electron systems is taken into account in an approximate way. We present first results from this development.