2010/05/31 by N. G. Kelkar
Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic and Molecular Physics #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Dwell time #Formalism (music) #Mathematical analysis #Mathematics #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Quantum optics and atomic interactions #Scattering #Separable space #nucl-th #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.81.062109
published as Phys.Rev.A81:062109,2010 · 13 pages, reference added
openalex publication_date 2010/06/10 · arxiv created 2010/06/23 · arxiv updated 2014/11/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The lifetime of an unstable state or resonance formed as an intermediate state in two-body scattering is known to be related to the dwell time or the time spent within a given region of space by the two interacting particles. This concept is extended to the case of three-body systems and a relation connecting the three-body dwell time with the two-body dwell times of the substructures of the three-body system is derived for the case of separable wave functions. The Kapur-Peierls formalism is revisited to discover one of the first definitions of dwell time in the literature. An extension of the Kapur-Peierls formalism to the three-body case shows that the lifetime of a three-body resonance can indeed be given by the three-body dwell time.