MUON STICKING FRACTIONS FOR S-STATES OF THE TD-MU ION INCLUDING THE EFFECTS OF NUCLEAR-INTERACTIONS

Nonadiabatic wave functions obtained including the effect of strong nuclear interaction by means of the R-matrix theory were used to compute the initial sticking fractions for the S states of td-mu. The standard sticking formula was suitably generalized to allow the application of the wave functions defined only outside the nuclear surfaces. The initial sticking fractions are found to be 0.917 x 10(-2) for the ground state and 0.915 x 10(-2) for the first excited state, and are about 3% larger than the values obtained neglecting the effects of nuclear forces. Our results agree with the most recent experimental data. This agreement indicates that the number of fusions per muon achieved in current experiments is close to the theoretical limit.