Chemical binding effects in resonance--Potential interference scattering for harmonic crystals

Abstract

The neutron scattering cross section which is the quantity directly measured in experiments is given by the absolute square of the scattering amplitude. For energies near a resonance, this yields three terms: potential, resonant and interference. In this paper, we deal with the interference neutron scattering cross section which is written in terms of a three-point correlation function. This function is calculated for the ideal gas and harmonic crystal models. For short collision times, the interference result for harmonic crystals is the same as the ideal gas but it has an effective temperature. This is the same effective temperature as was previously found for absorption and pure resonant processes. Therefore, the interference scattering cross section can be treated in the same way resonant scattering and absorption are treated using an ideal gas result with the usual effective temperature.