HELICITY CONSERVATION IN COULOMB SCATTERING OF THE DIRAC FIELD IN THE EXPANDING DE SITTER SPACE

Abstract

We comment on a previous calculation1 for the scattering amplitude for the Dirac field in an external Coulomb potential in the expanding de Sitter space. The result implies that for initial and final fermion states with identical momenta |pi|=|pf| the helicity of the particle is conserved. We make a classical analysis of the scattering problem in the small scattering angle approximation using the Bargmann–Michel–Telegdi equation and show that helicity conservation also manifests in the classical case. We also show that in Minkowski space there is a complete agreement between the classical and quantum polarization angle of the scattered particle.