Laricchia, G;
(2018)
A statistical description of scattering at the quantum level.
Scientific Reports
, 8
, Article 15056. 10.1038/s41598-018-33425-8.
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Abstract
Quantum physics is undoubtedly the most successful theory of the microscopic world, yet the complexities which arise in applying it even to simple atomic and molecular systems render the description of basic collision probabilities a formidable task. For this reason, approximations are often employed, the validity of which may be restricted to given energy regimes and/or targets and/or projectiles. Now we have found that the lognormal function, widely used for the probability distribution of macroscopic stochastic events (as diverse as periods of incubation of and recovery from diseases, size of grains, abundance of species, fluctuations in economic quantities, etc.) may also be employed to describe the energy dependence of inelastic collisions at the quantum level (including ionization, electron capture and excitation by electrons, positrons, protons, antiprotons, etc.), by allowing for the relevant threshold energy. A physical interpretation is discussed in this article by analogy with the heat capacity of few-level systems in solid state physics. We find the generality of the analysis to extend also to nuclear reactions. As well as aiding the description of collision probabilities for quantum systems, this finding is expected to impact also on the fundamental understanding of the interface between the classical and quantum domains.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | A statistical description of scattering at the quantum level |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s41598-018-33425-8 |
| Publisher version: | http://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-33425-8 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author(s) 2018, Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Te images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Physics and Astronomy |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10066414 |
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