A superconfiguration approach to multi-electron ionization of Xe under strong x-ray irradiation

The production of highly ionized states in xenon under intense x-ray irradiation, is discussed with the help of specific calculations. The approach, which retains only one-photon absorption processes (photoionization and photoexcitation) as well as Auger and radiative relaxations, makes use of properly defined superconfigurations as a global ensemble of configurations. With a tractable number of (super) levels, we explain the occurrence of the highest charge states observed in experiments.