Wigner time delay revisited

Abstract

The concept of Wigner time delay was introduced in scattering theory to quantify the delay or advance of an incoming particle in its interaction with the scattering potential. The scattered-wave part of the wave packet, which describes the interacting particle, is delayed/advanced with respect to the non-interacting plane-wave packet. It has been widely assumed that this concept can be transferred to ionization considering it as a half-scattering process. In the present work we show, by analyzing the corresponding wave packets, that this assumption is incorrect. For ionization the outgoing wave packet is a superposition of the continuum states ψk(−)(r,t), which satisfy the incoming-wave boundary condition at large distances r from the origin and which for large time t→∞ form a plane-wave packet. The expansion coefficients in this wave packet are the ionization probability amplitudes. If these amplitudes depend on the scattering phase shift, the plane-wave part of the ionized wave packet may be modified, leading to an ionization analog of the Wigner time delay. However, in most cases such a Wigner time delay is absent for ionization. We illustrate this with two examples: (i) photoionization by a weak field of an atom with the electron bound by a zero-range potential and (ii) strong-field ionization.