Bound-state poles of a partial-wave S-matrix Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-11-05
A pole at with represents a normalizable bound state of energy . Resonance poles instead lie away from the imaginary axis on the analytically continued unphysical sheet.
Fixed-angle softness of an open-string amplitude Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-11-05
At high energy with fixed, reflection and Stirling formulas for the gamma function give the displayed exponential envelope, away from real-axis resonance poles or after suitable analytic continuation. It is softer than the power-law fixed-angle behavior of typical point-particle interactions and exposes the finite string length. This limit differs from the fixed- Regge limit and does not by itself prove finiteness of every loop amplitude.
Fixed-angle softness of the closed-string amplitude Created 2026-10-06 Updated 2026-11-05
For , with , the smooth high-energy envelope satisfies . The Gamma function asymptotics cancel the leading terms, leaving exponential suppression. Exact real-axis resonance poles must be excluded or treated by analytic continuation.
A hard wall at the origin and an attractive delta potential at distance form a leaky quantum cavity. For unit incident amplitude from outside, the interior standing wave has coefficient , where and . Its modulus squared is the title expression. A resonance pole produces an enhancement with a locally Lorentzian line shape, proportional to . At fixed low and small , and .
The coefficient can exceed one because it measures a standing-wave amplitude, while the net interior probability current is zero. Conservation of probability current gives unit reflected flux: no current passes through the hard wall. Near zero, when ; the threshold case requires a separate limit.
Neutron capture resonance 2026-10-18
A neutron capture resonance is an energy interval where a matching excited state of the combined atomic nucleus enhances capture. Its collision cross-section can have a peak rather than a monotone dependence on energy. The resonance pole description connects this to quantum scattering. Slowing a neutron through such a region can first increase and then decrease a particular reaction response. The capture probability also competes with other reaction channels.
Write and retain the nuclear Coulomb potential. In spherical coordinates, the total potential energy is
when ; is a Legendre polynomial. Treat the added term using quadratic anisotropic perturbation of hydrogen and degenerate perturbation theory in the hydrogen energy eigenbasis. It preserves parity and , so it cannot mix with , or distinct magnetic sublevels.
For a hydrogen atom, the hydrogen radial second moment gives
The angular expectation values of are for an orbital, for , and for , obtained by integrating the squared spherical harmonics. Therefore the five lowest spatial quantum states, counting statistical weight, have first-order energy levels
Each spatial quantum state has two electron spin states when spin-orbit coupling and the magnetic field are omitted. Thus these are five spatial states but only three distinct first-order energies; five distinct energies would be an incorrect reading. The accidental equality can be lifted at higher order. Quantitatively the added shifts must also be small compared with neighboring principal-shell gaps; is an asymptotic condition, not a guarantee for arbitrary large .
Figure 1.
First-order spatial levels of locally perturbed hydrogen; the gap between principal shells is compressed
. Details.
For general , the expectation value is
It does not cancel every order. At , couples to orbitals. For example its angular matrix element with is , and the radial matrix element is nonzero. The second-order nondegenerate perturbation theory sum has negative denominators, so this is a concrete nonzero higher-order contribution.
There is also a global limitation: for either negative above, . A localized wavepacket translated far along has fixed kinetic energy but arbitrarily negative potential energy, proving there is no true lowest energy level. The results describe local perturbative resonance poles, or a potential completed to a confining form far from the atomic nucleus. No globally exact ground-state cancellation exists for the potential as printed.
With outgoing-channel index first, the scattering matrix convention is as . An even potential commutes with parity, so its incoming even and odd channels remain separate: .
For the odd channel, on write , while on its prescribed normalization is . A delta potential keeps the wavefunction continuous and imposes , with . Thus the exterior logarithmic derivative is . Matching gives
Multiplying numerator and denominator by and using exponential forms yields
For real , the numerator of the fraction is the complex conjugate of its denominator, and the prefactor has modulus one. Hence , conservation of probability flux in this single elastic parity channel. In particular the minus sign built into makes the free odd-channel matrix element equal to one.
For an odd bound state, continue to , . A pole means the outgoing solution is exponentially decaying on both sides. Its denominator vanishes when
The function rises strictly from to infinity: differentiation reduces positivity to . Thus there is exactly one positive solution if , and none otherwise. The numerator does not vanish at that solution, so the pole is genuine. Consequently
At equality the zero-energy threshold solution is not square integrable.
For repulsive strong barriers put and . The pole equation is . Since , multiplication by gives . Iterating in yields
This lower-half-plane resonance pole is an odd standing wave trapped between the barriers and slowly leaking by tunnelling. Its complex energy is , with . The factor then decays rather than grows; encodes the positive escape rate.
The conversion from a measured beam peak to a particle resonance mass is fixed, but the missing graph supplies neither the peak position nor its width. Let be the incoming pion kinetic energy at the peak and the full width at half maximum after allowing for instrumental resolution. With a stationary proton and natural units,
Thus the peak invariant mass is
The width must also be transformed to the centre-of-mass frame. To first order about the peak,
For a broad feature, transform the two half-height positions separately: if they are and , then the corresponding width in invariant mass is . An energy-dependent numerator or width can also displace the observed maximum from the resonance pole parameter.
The low-energy channel is normally dominated by , a Delta baryon with , and . As an external reference example, not a reading of the absent plot, and give , and .[ref] The actual graphical estimates remain unavailable. In particular, using the laboratory width directly in misses the factor .
For real , taking the modulus squared of the amplitude gives the half-line delta-well amplitude enhancement
The supplied resonance poles have real parts and negative imaginary parts for fixed low at .[ref] Linearizing the denominator at a simple pole gives
Thus the sketch has narrow, tall peaks with a locally Lorentzian line shape, just above positive integer multiples of . Their half-widths are , and the leading peak heights are . In this fixed-low-mode approximation, increasing broadens and lowers the peaks. Exactly at , the value is one. At zero it has the finite limit for .
The peaks represent long-lived standing waves between the wall and the attractive delta potential. Despite the source's transmission-coefficient terminology, is an internal amplitude factor and can exceed one. The interior probability current is zero, and the reflected probability current equals the incident magnitude; the hard wall passes no transmitted flux.
On the physical sheet the bound-state amplitude poles lie at , , and map to real negative . The square-root map has two sheets meeting at the continuum threshold. Analytic continuation can also have virtual-state poles on the negative imaginary axis and resonance poles in the lower half-plane; these are not normalizable bound states. In the energy plane the resonances belong to the nonphysical sheet, rather than additional negative-axis bound levels.
For the algebraically continued probability, include the mirror poles contributed by as explained in part d; the two signs map to the same numerical energy but need not impose the same boundary condition. A sketch must label the sheet or the amplitude being plotted, rather than treating every singularity as a bound state.
An axially symmetric quadratic potential energy perturbation preserves parity and the component of orbital angular momentum. For , its first-order energy shifts are respectively , , , and . They follow by multiplying the hydrogen radial second moment by the angular average of , whose averages are . Negative makes the globally extended potential unbounded below; the shifts then describe local perturbative resonance poles or a potential stabilized at large distance.