Quantum Mechanical Scattering Theory
Introduction
Incident Flux of particles with mass
Elastic Scattering:
Internal states of particles
Start without considering any spin for the particles and that the target is thin, i.e. only a single scattering event.
Neglect coherent effects (interference between scattered waves).
The interactions are by central potentials,
Differential Cross Section
Total cross section:
Stationary Scattering States
Note that our energy is well defined to be
Assume collision occurs at time 0.
And for
Want a relationship between
The current is then,
Else,
Integral Scattering Equation
Note that since we are far away, the radial component is the most important scattering current contribution.
So,
Then,
Using Fourier methods we would arrive at,
Since
From the worksheet, we find
Recall the dyson series, now we can see,
This is called the Born Expansion, when you stop with the first term. It is valid when future terms are smaller than the previous ones. Hence the series terms are monotomically decreasing after a certain point.
So,
Then,
Then,
Example:
This approximation then works better for higher energy since the perturbative series would be smaller, and thus more like a perturbation. Also, ’small’
Method of Partial Waves
From before, we had the CSCO:
For a central potential,
For waves, we have
Far away, we throw away
Then our asymptotic waves are then
What if
Recall from before,
Then, we want to find
Note,
Then, we have
Starting with
From before,
Scattering off Hard Sphere
For
We have,
Our boundary condition now is,
Then,
At
Note,
Then,
For
For slow particles,
Then for slow particles,
Classically, we would expect a cross section of
Identical Particles
Colliding two identical particles.
Detector 1 is at an angle
We then need to symmetrize/ antisymmetrize our wavefunctions.
Then,
Then the differential cross section is
For a spin-1/2 fermion,
For
For a spin-1 boson,
Example
Given two particles with a Colomb interaction.
We will consider the bosonic case (alpha) and the fermionic case (pp,ee).