2

Scattering
2.1 SCATTERING AMPLITUDE AND CROSS SECTION
Scattering of one object by another plays an important role in the sciences and beyond. The scattering of a photon by atoms or molecules makes it possible for you to read this text. Photons from ambient light sources are scattered from the molecules on the surface of the page, some of these enter the eye and are again scattered by molecules in the retina. In physics, scattering of particles (often photons) off molecules, atoms, nuclei, or elementary particles give information about the targets constituents. We shall see that a necessary condition for looking inside the target (we call that probing the target) requires that the projectile particles have a wavelength much shorter than the size of the object to be probed. Quantum Physics tells us that = h/p so to get short wavelengths we need large momenta and thus energies. This is one of the two reasons for having ever larger accelerators in elementary particle physics where we are now probing the constituents (quarks) of the proton and the neutron. Of course this works best if the probe itself is a structureless particle (or has a known structure). The second reason is that scattering experiments give information on the interaction between projectile and target. If a new type of interaction is at work in a scattering process, measurements of the scattering process will give information about that interaction. The scattering process is shown schematically in Figure 2.1. A beam of incident particles (the projectiles), each with momentum k parallel to the +z-axis, is incident from the left upon a target at rest. The target is surrounded by one or more detectors that detect scattered particles within a usually small solid angle subtended by each detector. The incident particle is represented by a plane wave i = exp(ikz) while the scattered particle is represented by a spherical wave s = [f ( , ) exp(ikr)]/r with k the wave vector. The angles and specify
An Introduction to Advanced Quantum Physics Hans P. Paar 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd