A method is presented to measure separate cross sections for collisional de
excitation of metastable ions via radiative and non-radiative processes. Th
e principle of the experiment is to first determine the total collisional d
eexcitation cross section in an attenuation-like measurement. After this th
e non-radiative part is determined separately in a measurement where the io
nized target atom (unique to the non-radiative process) is detected. Here w
e discuss recently published results on deexcitation of metastable He+(2s)
ions colliding with Ar at 1.65 keV/amu [H. T. Schmidt et al., Phys. Rev A 5
7, R4082 (1998) and Phys. Rev. A 58 (1998)] as well as preliminary results
for a Xe target. In both cases we find that the dominating contribution fro
m radiative deexcitation agrees with the result of a semi-classical calcula
tion of the 2s-2p mixing driven by the induced dipole held of the target at
om modified by taking competing processes, for which we measured the cross
sections, into account. Finally the extension to H-like projectile ions in
higher charge states is discussed.