Undergraduate Research at Jefferson Lab

Numerical Study of Coupled Channel Scattering Interactions in a Finite Volume

Student: Taylor Powell

School: Old Dominion University

Mentored By: Raúl Briceño

Three-body interactions play an important role throughout modern-day particle, nuclear, and hadronic physics, which require an understanding of the dynamics of relativistic multi-hadron systems. Many experimentally observed reactions of interest for testing the Standard Model decay strongly into two or more channels of two and three-particle systems. Thus, a full description of coupled-channel scattering processes involving both two-particle and three-particle decay channels from quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is required. The focus of this project was to obtain the interacting spectrum of a coupled-channel system with two relativistic particles of different species interacting in a large finite volume. To accomplish this, a robust method for solving the Lüscher quantization condition was developed using knowledge of the non-interacting spectrum to bound the energetic regions where interactions occur. New interacting spectra were computed for these regimes, resulting in novel graphs of scattering amplitudes and phase shifts for these systems. These calculations will allow for robust consistency checks of the newly developed formalism with known results.

[Watch the presentation on YouTube]