Physics Commons^™

Resonance Phenomena And Time Asymmetric Quantum Mechanics, Arno Rudolf Bohm, Fati̇h Erman, Haydar Uncu

Turkish Journal of Physics

This article is a review of time asymmetric quantum theory and its consequences applied to the resonance and decay phenomena. We first give some phenomenological results about resonances and decaying states to support the popular idea that resonances characterized by a width \Gamma and decaying states characterized by a lifetime \tau are different appearances of the same physical entity. Based on Weisskopf-Wigner (WW) methods, one obtains approximately \frac{\hbar}{\tau}\approx \Gamma. However, using standard axioms of quantum physics it is not possible to establish a rigorous theory to which the various WW methods can be considered as approximations. In standard quantum theory, …