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SCATTERING

2.2.4 Born Approximation

We often limit ourselves to the Born approximation and use the second term in Equation (2.29) for s . It represents the scattered particle and we use it to calculate the amplitude for nding the scattered particle in a detector located at the position x. Detectors are placed at distances much larger than the typical dimensions of the target. We are therefore interested in the limit that |x| while x remains nite and very small relative to |x| so 1. We expand the quantity |x x | in Equation (2.17) as follows |x |/|x| |x x | = (x x )2 = x2 2x x + x 2 (2.30)

= |x| 1 2

xx x2 xx + 2 |x| 1 2 2 x x x

where we neglected x 2 /x2 relative to |x |/|x| and used that 1 1 1 2 . So we get x k |x x | = k |x| k (2.31) x = k |x| k x |x| where we dened k =k x |x| (2.32)

The vector k is the momentum of the scattered particle because it is parallel to x and has magnitude k as it should, see Equation (2.1). Substitution in 1 gives Equation (2.17) and using |x |/|x| G(x, x ) = eik|xx | eik|x| eik x |x| |x| (2.33)

Using this expression in the second term of Equation (2.29) and dropping the remaining terms to implement the Born approximation we get (x) = eikx = eikx 2m 4 2m 4 d3 x eik|x| eik x V (x ) eikx |x| eik|x| |x| (2.34)

d3 x ei(kx k x ) V (x )

Comparing this expression with Equation (2.1) we nd (with |x| = r) the scattering amplitude in the Born approximation f ( , ) = 2m 4 d3 x ei(kk )x V (x) (2.35)