Relativistic Theory of Radiative Orbital Electron Capture

Abstract

A fully relativistic treatment of the radiation accompanying nuclear capture of orbital electrons is presented. All effects of the electrostatic field surrounding the nucleus are taken into account. As a preliminary step, convenient representations for the electron Green's function and initial state wave function in a Coulomb field are derived. These forms, involving Dirac operators applied to scalar functions and free-particle angular eigenfunctions, are developed from the second-order Dirac equation. They are particularly useful for calculations since the procedures which make use of the properties of traces can be employed with them.