Cross Sections for Inelastic 2-to-2 Meson-Meson Scattering in Hadronic Matter

Abstract

With quark-antiquark annihilation and creation in the first Born approximation, we study the reactions: $K\bar{K}\to K{\bar{K}}^{\ast },K\bar{K}\to K^{\ast }\bar{K},\pi K\to \pi K^{\ast },\pi K\to \rho K,\pi \pi \to K{\bar{K}}^{\ast },\pi \pi \to K^{\ast }\bar{K},\pi \pi \to K^{\ast }{\bar{K}}^{\ast },\pi \rho \to K\bar{K},\pi \rho \to K^{\ast }{\bar{K}}^{\ast },\rho \rho \to K^{\ast }{\bar{K}}^{\ast },K{\bar{K}}^{\ast }\to \rho \rho$, and $K^{\ast }\bar{K}\to \rho \rho$. Unpolarized cross sections for the reactions are obtained from transition amplitudes that are composed of mesonic quark-antiquark relative-motion wave functions and the transition potential for quark-antiquark annihilation and creation. From a quark-antiquark potential that is equivalent to the transition potential, we prove that the total spin of the two final mesons may not equal the total spin of the two initial mesons. Based on flavor matrix elements, cross sections for some isospin channels of reactions can be obtained from the other isospin channels of reactions. Remarkable temperature dependence of the cross sections is found.

Comments: more discussions added, figures 1 and 2 modified