Probing phase of a scattering amplitude beyond the plane-wave approximation

Abstract

Within a plane-wave approach, a number of scattering events in a collision is insensitive to a general phase of a transition amplitude, although this phase is extremely important for a number of problems, especially in hadronic physics. In reality the particles are better described as wave packets, and here we show that the observables grow dependent upon this phase if one lays aside the simplified plane-wave model. We discuss two methods for probing how the Coulomb- and hadronic phases change with a transferred momentum $t$, either by colliding two beams at a non-vanishing impact-parameter or by employing such novel states as the vortex particles carrying orbital angular momentum or the Airy beams. For electron-electron collision, the phase contribution to a cross section can reach the values higher than $10^{-4}--10^{-3}$ for well-focused beams with energies of hundreds of keV.

7 pages, 1 figure; the effect persists for relativistic energies

References in corpus (6)

• Nonparaxial Mathieu and Weber accelerating beams
• Semiclassical Dynamics of Electron Wave Packet States with Phase Vortices
• Atomic scale electron vortices for nanoresearch
• Colliding particles carrying non-zero orbital angular momentum
• Neutrino oscillations: Entanglement, energy-momentum conservation and QFT
• Elastic scattering of vortex electrons provides direct access to the Coulomb phase

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Scattering of wave packets with phases
• Kinematic surprises in twisted particle collisions