The structure of the many-body wavefunction for scattering

Abstract

We show that the scattered part of the many-body wavefunction initiated by two incoming clusters is given by a fully connected operator acting on the initial channel state. The structure of this operator suggests a division of the full wavefunction into two-cluster components. A set of coupled equations in both the differential and integral form is then derived for these components. These equations have structure and properties similar to the three-body equations of Faddeev. We demonstrate that each component has outgoing waves in a unique two-cluster partition. The transition amplitude for any final arrangement can therefore be extracted directly from the outgoing waves in the relevant components.