A microscopic, coupled-channel theory of pion scattering

The authors develop a new and comprehensive coordinate-space theory of pion-nucleus scattering to facilitate disentangling the conventional aspects of pion scattering from the non-conventional ones relevant to issues of hadron dynamics. They work in coordinate space in order to both unify and extend the relatively extensive and successful analyses of exclusive pion-nucleus reactions previously made within a similar framework. They construct the optical potential microscopically in shell-model framework by summing particle-hole pair configurations, leading naturally to a coupled-channel formulation. The theory includes a complete treatment of all spin-isospin components of the pion-nucleon scattering amplitude, and Fermi averaging is done explicitly. The authors present numerical results showing the significance of Fermi motion and spin dependence on charge-exchange angular distributions: Single and double spin flip are shown to play dominant and generally unappreciated roles in charge-exchange reactions, and corrections for Fermi motion are shown to be needed in order to quantitatively separate medium effects from conventional multiple scattering. 72 refs., 11 figs