Over more than a decade, experimental studies of the production and transport of projectile excited states in thin solid targets have been performed at GANIL for Ar17+ and Kr35+ in the so-called high velocity domain. A range of target thicknesses from single collision condition to equilibrium has been investigated. X-ray spectroscopy techniques have allowed us to determine absolute nℓ populations of core and Rydberg projectile states, as well as the relative population of fine structure substates (nℓj). In parallel, theoretical simulations to treat on the same footing all the competing processes, i.e., collisions, radiative decay and dynamical screening due to the wake field, have been developed. Methods based on either master equations or Monte Carlo approaches have allowed us to reach an unprecedented precision in the description of the ion transport in matter in the perturbative regime. In particular, a first direct measurement of the wake field usually extracted from ion stopping power has been performed.