Physical review. D. Particles, fields, gravitation, and cosmology/Physical review. D. Particles and fields
Narrow resonances in statistical mechanics
Roger F. Dashen, RAMAMURTI RAJARAMAN
Abstract
It is shown that when the dynamics of a system is dominated by narrow-resonance formation it behaves like a noninteracting system with added species of free particles, corresponding to all the quantum numbers and the statistics of each of the resonances. This equivalence, widely assumed and used in practice, is established by explicitly constructing many-particle $S$ matrices consistent with unitarity that correspond to purely resonance-dominated dynamics. These are then used in the $S$-matrix formulation of statistical mechanics to obtain the grand partition function, which is seen to reveal the above result. In the following paper, operational criteria are presented for determining when in general narrow resonances and loosely bound states may be treated as "elementary" particles.