Coherent and incoherent atomic scattering: Formalism and application to pionium interacting with matter

Abstract

The experimental determination of the lifetime of pionium provides a very important test on chiral perturbation theory. This quantity is determined in the DIRAC experiment at CERN. In the analysis of this experiment, the breakup probabilities of of pionium in matter are needed to high accuracy as a theoretical input. We study in detail the influence of the target electrons. They contribute through screening and incoherent effects. We use Dirac-Hartree- Fock-Slater wavefunctions in order to determine the corresponding form factors. We find that the inner-shell electrons contribute less than the weakly bound outer electrons. Furthermore, we establish a more rigorous estimate for the magnitude of the contributions form the transverse current (magnetic terms thus far neglected in the calculations).

Journal of Physics B: Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics; (accepted; 22 pages, 6 figures, 26 references) Revised version: more detailed description of DIRAC experiment; failure of simplest models for incoherent scattering demonstrated by examples

Cited by in corpus (10)

• First measurement of the ${\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}$ atom lifetime
• Detection of ${\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}$atoms with the DIRAC spectrometer at CERN
• A Monte Carlo Calculation of the Pionium Break-up Probability with Different Sets of Pionium Target Cross Sections
• Measurement of the $\pi K$ atom lifetime and the $\pi K$ scattering length
• Dynamics of the Pionium with the Density Matrix Formalism
• First measurement of a long-lived ${\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}$ atom lifetime
• Density Matrix Kinetic Equation Describing a Passage of Fast Atomic Systems Through Matter
• A Complete Version of the Glauber Theory for Elementary Atom - Target Atom Scattering and Its Approximations
• Dimesoatom breakup in the Coulomb field
• Transition of dimuonium through foil