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L-subshell ionization of Au and Bi induced by boron impact has been investigated for impact energies ranging from 0.48 to 0.88 MeV/u. The energy dependence of the measured ionization cross section shows, for the first time, a plateau structure for all three subshells. The plateau structure revealed by previous data for proton and helium impact was for the L1 subshell only and this had been attributed to the bimodal nature of the 2s electron density. The observed plateau structure for all the three subshells and its occurrence at a somewhat lower energy signifies a considerable amount of Stark mixing of target 2s and 2p atomic wavefunctions. Fresh calculations incorporating the Stark mixing effect in target atomic wavefunctions are necessary to improve agreement with the present data. The existing theories, however, are found to be inadequate.

We measure the projectile K x-ray spectra as a function of the beam energies around the Coulomb barrier in different collision systems. The energy is scanned in small steps around the barrier aiming to explore the nuclear effects on the elastically scattered projectile ions. The variation of the projectile x-ray energy with the ion-beam energies exhibits an unusual increase in between the interaction barrier and fusion barrier energies. This additional contribution to the projectile ionization can be attributed to the shakeoff of outer-shell electrons of the projectile ions due to the sudden nuclear recoil (∼10^{-21}  sec) caused by the attractive nuclear potential, which gets switched on near the interaction barrier energy. In the sudden approximation limit, the theoretical shakeoff probability calculation due to the nuclear recoil explains the observed data well. In addition to its fundamental interest, such processes can play a significant role in dark matter detection through the possible mechanism of x-ray emissions, where the weakly interacting massive particle-nucleus elastic scattering can lead to the nuclear-recoil-induced inner-shell vacancy creations. Furthermore, the present work may provide new prospects for atomic physics research at barrier energies as well as provide a novel technique to perform barrier distribution studies for two-body systems.