Quantum-Mechanical Treatment of Inelastic Collisions. I. General Theory and Application to Nonreactive Collisions

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Abstract
A general method for the quantum-mechanical treatment of the inelastic collision of composite particles is presented. The method, which is applicable to both nonreactive and reactive collisions, consists of constructing the total stationary scattering wavefunction describing the collision as a linear combination of linearly independent functions which satisfy the Schödinger equation and also arbitrary boundary conditions specified in the asymptotic region. The formalism is developed for nonreactive collisions using a collinear model to simplify the mathematical treatment. In this paper, it is applied to two examples of impulsive collisions. In one case, for which a comparison is possible, calculated transition probabilities agree well with previously published values.