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American Journal of Physics

Scattering Theory and Adiabatic Switching

Kurt Haller

Published Aug 1, 1963• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

An elementary procedure for deriving the Born (Liouville-Neumann) series for the transition amplitude for elastic scattering is developed. It is shown that the use of adiabatic switching eliminates the difficulties of energy nonconserving transitions and ambiguously defined improper integrals, which are usual in elementary treatments in textbooks.

DOI
10.1119/1.1969692

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An elementary procedure for deriving the Born (Liouville-Neumann) series for the transition amplitude for elastic scattering is developed. It is shown that the use of adiabatic switching eliminates the difficulties of energy nonconserving transitions and ambiguously defined improper integrals, which are usual in elementary treatments in textbooks.
A formalism, previously presented, for describing atom-atom scattering in the adiabatic representation to higher orders in mM\frac{m}{M}Mm​ is generalized to describe the problem of different isotopes and different atoms. This is accomplished by a sequence of nonlinear coordinate transformations which introduce a "switching function" which is defined only in the asymptotic limit of separated atoms. It is found that the effective potential for elastic scattering contains energy-dependent terms in order mM\frac{m}{M}Mm​ and that it also depends upon the switching function in this order so that the potential is not unique. It is also found that in this order the definition of adiabatic states is not a trivial problem. A variational choice is made for the switching function and explicit calculations are presented for the He-He interaction. The coupled equations describing transitions are then derived and it is shown that terms are omitted from the usual coupling operator which are of the same order of magnitude as the one usually kept. This leads to a modification of the usual Landau-Zener transition formula.
The scattering properties of any complex scattering potential, , can be obtained from the dynamics of a particular non-unitary two-level quantum system . The application of the adiabatic approximation to yields a semiclassical treatment of the scattering problem. We examine the adiabatic series expansion for the evolution operator of and use it to obtain corrections of arbitrary order to the semiclassical formula for the transfer matrix of v. This results in a high-energy approximation scheme that unlike the semiclassical approximation can be applied for potentials with large derivatives.
Chapter 18 is entirely devoted to the quantum theory of scattering, which is normally covered in more detail in a course on quantum field theory. We introduce the main concepts, including scattering amplitude, differential and total cross sections, and form factors, and derive the main formulas for elastic scattering, in a nonrelativistic framework; this allows us to appreciate how the information obtained from scattering experiments is used to explore the intricacies of quantum particles that are otherwise inaccessible. The Born approximation is studied and applied to scattering by a periodic potential, a weak potential, and Rutherford scattering. The partial wave expansion is derived and applied to obtain the optical theorem. The chapter concludes with a complementary section on resonant scattering.
If a particle which can decay spontaneously is subjected to collisions with other particles the transition probability may be changed. The calculation of such an effect by the usual time-dependent perturbation methods is complicated by the circumstance that energy can be conserved in some intermediate states, because of the possibility of elastic scattering. The perturbation calculation is here modified in such a way that the resulting expression for the whole transition probability does not contain any divergences or spurious effects. By suitable approximations the expression is separated into two parts, one of which gives the probability of elastic scattering followed by a spontaneous transition, and the other the true stimulated transition probability which causes a change in the lifetime.