Partial Waves and Threshold Scattering
Rotational symmetry reduces a central-potential scattering problem to independent angular-momentum channels. Phase shifts encode the interaction in each channel, and threshold expansions describe low-energy behavior when their assumptions hold. Coulomb scattering needs separate care because its long-range asymptotics differ from the short-range case. Identical-particle amplitudes also require the appropriate exchange symmetry.
Helpful background. Use angular momentum, radial wave mechanics, and the amplitude convention from the first chapter.
Enter this chapter
Section titled “Enter this chapter”- Partial-Wave Expansion
- Phase Shifts
- Partial-Wave Cross Sections
- Low-Energy Scattering
- Scattering Length
- Effective-Range Expansion
- Coulomb Scattering
- Identical-Particle Scattering
- One-Dimensional Scattering Revisited
Use Scattering Theory to choose another chapter. General perturbative, variational, and semiclassical strategies are collected in Approximation and Semiclassical Methods.