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.

arXiv comment7 pages, 1 figure; the effect persists for relativistic energies

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Theory and applications of free-electron vortex states
• Promises and challenges of high-energy vortex states collisions
• Scattering of wave packets with phases
• Doing spin physics with unpolarized particles
• Kinematic surprises in twisted particle collisions
• Decay of the vortex muon
• Possibility to probe negative values of a Wigner function in scattering of a coherent superposition of electronic wave packets by atoms
• Threshold effects in high-energy vortex state collisions
• Exploring gravitational impulse via quantum Boltzmann equation
• Universal features of high-energy scattering of Laguerre-Gaussian states