Time Delay in Electron-C60 Elastic Scattering


  Miron Amusia  ,  Arkadiy Baltenkov  
Racah Institute of Physics, Jerusalem 91904, Israel
Ioffe Institute, St. Petersburg 194021, Russian Federation

Within the framework of a Dirac bubble potential model for the C60 fullerene shell, we calculated the time delay in slow-electron elastic scattering by C60. It appeared that the time of transmission of an electron wave packet through the Dirac bubble potential sphere that simulates a real potential of the C60 cage exceeds by more than an order of magnitude the transmission time via a single atomic core. Resonances in the time delays are due to the temporary trapping of electron into quasi-bound states before it leaves the interaction region. It is of interest to study time delays in elastic scattering processes experimentally. However, one should keep in mind that the duration of a quantum-mechanical process determined by Wigner's definition differs from respective value in classical physics, since uncertainty principle puts its limitation upon accuracy of definition of both duration and energy E, namely.