Scattering States

Stephen J. Gustafson, Israel Michael Sigal

James S. Douglas, Keith R. Burnett

We study the emergence of localization and entanglement in many-body systems as a result of scattering measurements. We show that consecutive scattering measurements on a many-body system can produce superposition states in position space. The resulting states are signaled in the scattering distribution and these states are robust under continued scattering. We also show that the average scattering distribution for an ensemble of experiments gives the initial state scattering distribution even when the initial state is completely destroyed by the scattering process.

Jing Cheng

We show how quantum entangled biphoton states can be used to realize ghost scattering, a nonlocal scheme to obtain scattering information of an unknown object through the correlation measurement of the scattering photons in two different optical paths. We present a framework to describe the biphoton ghost scattering process from the T-matrix formula of the scattering theory. We find the scattering information of a test object can be retrieved from either the test arm or the reference arm. By adjusting the biphoton states, the ghost scattering patterns may be varied from the scattering pattern of the object in the test arm to the object in the reference arm.

Scott Lawrence, Yukari Yamauchi

Quantum-mechanical scattering states are energy eigenstates obeying particular boundary conditions, whose behavior at infinity encodes the S-matrix which defines the outcoming of scattering experiments. With an eye toward numerical algorithms for computing nonrelativistic S-matrices, we present a family of stable minimum principles for scattering states. States that approximately satisfy these minimum principles are shown to have a bounded difference with the true scattering states. These minimum principles and stability estimates can be used to obtain rigorous bounds on scattering amplitudes. We show that these minimum principles are applicable to momentum-dependent potentials, long-range (Coulomb) interactions, and elastic or inelastic scattering of bound states.

Stephen J. Gustafson, Israel Michael Sigal