Emission of Charged Particles from Crystals

A quantum-mechanical treatment of the problem of the charged-particle emission from crystals has been presented. In addition to the mass and potential dependence established by the previous wave-mechanical calculations, we have illustrated the energy and the temperature dependence by assuming the crystal to be initially in a low-lying state and calculating the renormalization of the particle wave function using the Debye model for the lattice vibrations. The attenuation is shown to be a natural consequence of the inelastic processes, and its magnitude is found to be small compared to previous conjectures.