The radial S wave vanishes at the hard surface, so outside the sphere . Comparison with gives
The hard-sphere S-wave scattering amplitude and cross section are therefore
The three prominent features are the finite low-energy limit , the oscillations with exact zeros at for positive integers , and the decreasing envelope . The zero-energy value is four times the geometric area . Near zero the normalized cross section is . The large- fall here concerns the S wave alone; summing all partial waves gives a different high-energy total.
Figure 1.
Hard-sphere S-wave cross-section and delta-shell Born angular scattering
. Dimensionless curves calculated directly from the derived scattering amplitudes. The left panel concerns only the S wave, while the right panel shows different incident wave numbers for the weak delta-shell model. Details.