“…Much less effort has been devoted to the ionization of atoms in excited states. Ionization cross sections have been measured for the metastable rare gas atoms He [4,5], Ne [6,7], and Ar [6] and several calculations using different approximations have been carried out for these targets [8,9,10] including an earlier calculation based on the semi-classical Deutsch-Märk (DM) formalism [11].…”