Re: [Phys-L] Energy & Bonds

[Bill Nettles <bnettles@uu.edu>]

I would agree that the deuteron is an excellent system for examining nucleon-nucleon interactions in the "simplest" form. Also, I would say that the smaller the binding energy, the more the package has characteristics of individuals. Since the binding energy of the deuteron is only 2 MeV, it's a pretty good system to look at bound neutron behavior and extrapolate some of that to neutron behavior.  But the deuteron also has some characteristics of its own due to the angular momentum couplings. We can do scattering of neutrons from hydrogen molecules  to isolate the "pure" nucleon-nucleon interactions by comparing to deuteron scattering.

The scattering wave function isn't an isolated neutron.  It's a neutron+proton wave function, so you get interference effects |psi-n +psi-p|^2, not |psi-n|^2 + |psi-p|^2.  That's not a "spectator" proton.  I agree you can extract the effects for the most part.



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Phys-l [mailto:phys-l-bounces@phys-l.org] On Behalf Of Bruce
> Sherwood
> Sent: Thursday, November 14, 2013 8:41 PM
> To: Phys-L@Phys-L.org
> Subject: Re: [Phys-L] Energy & Bonds
>
> Agreed (with JD). And in the case of using deuterium for experiments dealing
> with scattering off neutrons, you do have to apply corrections to the data to
> take into account the effects of the "spectator" proton, but it just wouldn't
> be useful to try to say that you're not doing scattering off a neutron.
>
> Bruce