Critique of Breit-Wigner resonance scattering
Abstract
In the standard Breit-Wigner approach to scattering the phase shift is to have a form at a real energy resonance. This leads to complex energy poles in the scattering amplitude at , poles that are identified with unstable physical particles. By solving the square well scattering problem we identify some challenges to this approach. We find that setting is not always a good description of the real energy scattering amplitude, that can be negative, that is not in fact an energy eigenvalue (and thus not a physical particle), and that states that decay in energy possess spatial wave functions that unacceptably grow exponentially. All of this is resolved by noting that because of its antilinear symmetry solutions to the square well Schr\"odinger equation appear in complex conjugate energy pairs with , doing so in a way that gives a time independent probability amplitude that neither grows nor decays in time or space, and leads to just one now observable physical resonance not two.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.28756,
title = {Critique of Breit-Wigner resonance scattering},
author = {Philip D. Mannheim},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.28756},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
10 pages. Revtex4