Relativistic effects in two-body Coulomb collisions are investigated within a classical context. Special emphasis is given to heavy-ion collisions at intermediate energies. It is found that such corrections may be responsible for a 10–20 % increase of the elastic cross sections for a fixed scattering angle and kinetic energy. Comparisons with other methods are also made and some useful simple parametrizations of the cross sections are obtained. The separate contributions from kinematic and retardation corrections are also studied.

• Received 3 April 1990

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.42.2180