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Thursday, June 30, 2016

Two-particle scattering at one loop

In his book on quantum field theory, Srednicki performs many calculations in the \phi^3 theory in six dimensions, which has Lagrangian \begin{equation*} \mathcal{L} = \frac{1}{2} \partial_{\mu} \phi \partial^{\mu} \phi - \frac{1}{2} m^2 \phi^2 + \frac{g}{6} \phi^3 \end{equation*} For example, in chapter 20 Srednicki calculates the two particle scattering amplitude, including all one-loop corrections. In this post I illustrate the result.
The one-loop amplitude is \begin{equation*} i \mathcal{M} = i V_4(s,t,u) + \left( \left( i V_3(s)\right) ^2 \Delta(s) + s \leftrightarrow t + t \leftrightarrow u \right) \end{equation*} Here, V_3 and V_4 are the one-loop expressions for the vertices, \Delta is the one-loop expression for the propagator and s, t, u are the Mandelstam variables. The propagator \Delta is given by a one-dimensional integral, the vertex V_3 by a 2-dimensional integral and V_4 by a 3-dimensional integral. I do not write down explicit expressions as the formulas are quite long [1].

NIntegrate in Mathematica does not have problems calculating \Delta. However, I struggled a lot to calculate V_3 with NIntegrate, but at the end managed to calculate V_3 satisfactorily. When calculating V_4 with NIntegrate, I get many warnings and error messages in Mathematica. I spent a bit of time trying to resolve these, but did not succeed. I have ignored all warnings and error messages in Mathematica, the graphs below are thus possibly not accurate.

The coupling constant g=10 in the graphs below. This seems large, but I think that the perturbation series is essentially in \alpha = g^2 / (4 \pi)^3 \sim 0.05, which is sufficiently small. I also did not want to take g too small because otherwise the loop corrections are barely visible. I plot |\mathcal{M}| in the center of mass frame as function of the scattering angle \theta.

In figure 1, the velocity of the incoming particles is 0.10. This corresponds with E = 1.00504 m

Fig 1. |\mathcal{M}| as function of \theta
black line: tree level, blue dots: one loop
v = 0.10
In figure 2, the velocity of the incoming particles is 0.50. This corresponds with E = 1.1547 m
Fig 2. |\mathcal{M}| as function of \theta
black line: tree level, blue dots: one loop
v = 0.50
In figure 3, the velocity of the incoming particles is 0.90. This corresponds with E = 2.29416 m
Fig 3. |\mathcal{M}| as function of \theta
black line: tree level, blue dots: one loop
v = 0.90

References
[1] Explicit formulas can be found in Srednicki, equations (20.3 - 20.11)
[2] In a previous post I plotted \mathcal{M} at tree level.
[3] Some Mathematica code can be found in a previous post.

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