Lecture 21
Lecture 21
Lecture 21
Optical Theorem
centrifugal potential
with
E>0
General solution is
spherical Bessel function spherical Neumann function
But for a scattering solution, as our early general results show: We must ensure
(boundary-condition matching)
Continuing the previous slide For fixed E, we could have many solutions with different angular momentum quantum number But note: their arbitrary superpositions are also an eigenstate of the same eigenvalue E. The scattering solution as an eigenstate of H with energy E, connected with an incoming state along z with energy E, for regimes away from the scattering potential, can hence be written as:
Exact solutions can then be found by connecting this solution with the solution in the scattering region.
Because is symmetric with , so all the terms due to the scattering potential should be independent of . Hence:
Legendre polynomial
large r
With this expression all in spherical coordinates, try to smoothly connect this solution to the wavefunction in the scattering region and then find the partial scattering amplitudes.
decays very fast with exponent 2l+1 which is the total surface area of the sphere !
For large r:
wave propagating away from the origin continued on the next slide
Continuing the previous slide For our elastic scattering here, total probability should be conserved, so the probability of propagating out should equal that of propagating in:
here
Optical Theorem:
The total cross section for a spherically symmetric scattering potential is EXACTLY given by the imaginary part of the forward scattering amplitude times 4/k
This theorem can be extended to inelastic scattering cases as well. It is in fact a very general law of wave scattering theory.
Summary:
We outlined how to use partial waves to find the exact solutions of a quantum scattering problem. We dont really have any new concepts here: for spherically symmetric systems we should focus on individual wavefunction components with different angular momenta; and to exactly solve the Schrodinger equation we need to consider boundary conditions and then patch wavefunctions at different regions together.
In many cases, a quantum scattering problem can be solved numerically. Terms like phase shifts, partial wave amplitudes will be very useful for understanding (and extracting information from) quantum scattering codes.