Green functions and completeness; the $3$-body problem revisited

TL;DR

This paper proves that for 3-body quantum systems with certain potentials, all non-threshold energies are stationary complete, ensuring strong energy dependence and unitarity of scattering matrices, and offers an alternative proof of asymptotic completeness.

Contribution

It establishes stationarity completeness at all non-threshold energies for 3-body systems, resolving a previous conjecture and strengthening continuity and unitarity properties of scattering matrices.

Findings

All non-threshold energies are stationary complete for 3-body systems.

Scattering quantities depend strongly continuously on energy at all non-threshold energies.

The scattering matrix is unitary at all non-threshold energies.

Abstract

Within the class of Derezi{\'n}ski-Enss pair-potentials which includes Coulomb potentials a stationary scattering theory for $N$-body systems was recently developed \cite {Sk1}. In particular the wave and scattering matrices as well as the restricted wave operators are all defined at any non-threshold energy, and this holds without imposing any a priori decay condition on channel eigenstates. In this paper we improve for the case of $3$-body systems on the known \emph{weak continuity} properties in that we show that all non-threshold energies are \emph{stationary complete} in this case, resolving a conjecture from \cite {Sk1} in the special case $N=3$. A consequence is that the above scattering quantities depend \emph{strongly continuously} on the energy parameter at all non-threshold energies, hence not only almost everywhere as previously demonstrated (for an arbitrary $N$). Another consequence is that the scattering matrix is unitary at any such energy. As a side result we give an independent stationary proof of asymptotic completeness for $3$-body systems with long-range pair-potentials. This is an alternative to the known time-dependent proofs \cite{De, En}.