A SIMPLE THEORETICAL DESCRIPTION OF COULOMB ON THE COULOMB MODIFIED SCATTERING LENGTH Gy. BENCZE
POLARIZATION
1986
EFFECTS
’ and C. CHANDLER
Department qf Physics and Astronomy, Umversity qf New Mexico. Albuquerque, NM 87131, LISA Received
23 July 1986
A simple formula is derived for the Coulomb modified s-wave scattering length function in the presence of long-range polarization potentials. When applied to a model of low-energy p-d scattering, the formula reproduces behavior previously described by Kvitsinskii and Merkuriev [Sov. J. Nucl. Phys. 41 (1985) 4121.
For some years it has been known that, in the presence of long-range polarization forces, the standard Coulomb-modified scattering length is infinite if the Coulomb interaction is repulsive [ l-31. Since this is so one must ask how to interpret the finite values that are routinely obtained in both experimental and theoretical studies. For low-energy p-d scattering this question was addressed by Kvitsinskii and Merkuriev [ 21. In their paper an important role was played by a certain approximation (cf. eq. (9) below) which, for energies of experimental interest, gives the wrong sign and the wrong absolute value (by a factor of 2-8). The discovery,that this is so prompted this paper, in which we reexamine and generalize the arguments of Kvitsinskii and Merkuriev and present results of numerical experiments. Our main results are a simple formula (eq. (7) below) for the Coulomb modified s-wave scattering length function in the presence of long-range potentials and, in the case of p-d scattering, a conlirmation of the general conclusions of Kvitsinskii and Merkuriev [ 21. We assume that we are dealing with an effective two-body problem, and we ignore spin (for simplicity). We denote the reduced mass of the system by p and the energy by E. The effective potential V(r) has the form ’ Permanent
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