Resonant multiple scattering of charged particles by N atoms

Rimantas Lazauskas, Jaume Carbonell

JOHN M. COWLEY

Ryan Thomas, K. O. Roberts, Eite Tiesinga +4 more

The wavefunction for indistinguishable fermions is anti-symmetric under particle exchange, which directly leads to the Pauli exclusion principle, and hence underlies the structure of atoms and the properties of almost all materials. In the dynamics of collisions between two indistinguishable fermions, this requirement strictly prohibits scattering into 90° angles. Here we experimentally investigate the collisions of ultracold clouds fermionic (40)K atoms by directly measuring scattering distributions. With increasing collision energy we identify the Wigner threshold for p-wave scattering with its tell-tale dumb-bell shape and no 90° yield. Above this threshold, effects of multiple scattering become manifest as deviations from the underlying binary p-wave shape, adding particles either isotropically or axially. A shape resonance for (40)K facilitates the separate observation of these two processes. The isotropically enhanced multiple scattering mode is a generic p-wave threshold phenomenon, whereas the axially enhanced mode should occur in any colliding particle system with an elastic scattering resonance.

Viktoriia Omelchenko

In this paper, the approach for considering fast charged particles scattering on targets of complex structure, which contains some isolated substructures, was expanded to account quadratic potential terms. Based on this approach, the differential cross section for scattering on the set of parallel planes with uniformly distributed atoms in each plane was obtained. It was shown that for this case the differential scattering cross section splits into coherent and incohent cross sections in the eikonal approximation analogously with the Born approximation.

Shunta Mochizuki, Yusuke Nishida

We study charged particles in three dimensions interacting via a short-range potential in addition to the Coulomb potential. When the Bohr radius and the scattering length are much larger than the potential range, low-energy physics of the system becomes independent from details of the short-range potential. We develop the zero-range theory to describe such universal physics in terms of the Bohr radius and the scattering length by generalizing the Bethe-Peierls boundary condition, which is then applied to two charged particles to reveal their bound states and resonances. Infinite resonances are found for a repulsive Coulomb potential, one of which turns into a bound state with increasing inverse scattering length, whereas infinite bound states exist for an attractive Coulomb potential with no resonances at any scattering length. The zero-range theory is also applied to three equally charged particles at infinite scattering length under the variational Born-Oppenheimer approximation. We find that the effective potential between two heavy particles induced by a light particle is an inverse-square attraction at distances shorter than the Bohr radius, leading to infinite deep bound states, whereas shallow ones successively turn into resonances with increasing Coulomb repulsion.

J. P. Toennies