The Semiclassical Coulomb Interaction

The semiclassical Coulomb excitation interaction is at times expressed in the Lorentz gauge in terms of the electromagnetic fields and a contribution from the scalar electric potential. We point out that the potential term can make spurious contributions to excitation cross sections, especially when the the decay of excited states is taken into account. We show that, through an appropriate gauge transformation, the excitation interaction can be expressed in terms of the electromagnetic fields alone.