Scattering amplitude
In quantum physics, the scattering amplitude is the amplitude of the outgoing spherical wave relative to the incoming plane wave in a stationary-state scattering process. The latter is described by the wavefunction
where is the position vector;
;
is the incoming plane wave with the wavenumber
along the
axis;
is the outgoing spherical wave;
is the scattering angle; and
is the scattering amplitude. The dimension of the scattering amplitude is length.