Measurement of Excited-State Charge-Exchange Cross Sections

A new fast-beam microwave optical detection technique which uses a specially designed interaction region to observe resonances with both polarizations of the microwave field and both polarizations of the emitted light has been developed to study charge-exchange collisions in greater detail. The first measurements of the partial cross sections for capture into each of the $L$ and $M_L$ states in the $n=3\mathrm{}$ manifold for protons incident on a nitrogen target are reported.