Determination of the Phase of the Wave Function in the Scattering of Particles

Rainer Dick

We show that inelastic scattering in a short-range potential leads to a collapse of the wave function within standard evolution through the Schrödinger equation, whereas elastic scattering will not collapse the wave function. Specifically, we find that the initial width of the emerging wave function in inelastic scattering is primarily determined by the size of the participating scattering center and the range of the scattering potential, but not by the width of the incoming wave function. This indicates that dynamical collapse of the wave function through inelastic scattering can explain the emergence of particle-like signals.

M. J. Seaton, G. Peach

Florian A. Scheck

Rainer Dick

We show that inelastic scattering leads to a collapse of the wave function within standard evolution through the Schroedinger equation, whereas elastic scattering will not collapse the wave function. Specifically, we find that the initial width of the emerging wave function in inelastic scattering is primarily determined by the size of the participating scattering center, but not by the width of the incoming wave function. This implies that dynamical collapse of the wave function through inelastic scattering, together with energy quantization in bound quantum systems, can explain the emergence of particle-like signals without the need to invoke the Born rule.

SHI YUN LONG, S.N.NABEEL, ZHANG YU MEI +3 more

The Gaussian wave functional method is applied to investigate the effects of the scattering of a local impurity to the one dimensional conduction electrons,whose low energy behavior can be described by the Luttinger model. Our results show that both the single particle scattering and pair particle scattering are important in this case. The competition between these two scattering mechanisms gives rise to the renormalized masses for both charge and spin density waves. The vanishing of these masses depicts the phase boundaries in the parameter space,different dynamical behaviors are thus determined.