BORN APPROXIMATION

55

where in the second line we have used that n = r/r and in the third line we have neglected ikr relative to 1 and set exp(ikr) = 1. Thus we have shown that ( 2 + k2 ) exp(ikr)/r behaves like 4 (r) with r = |x x | or that Equation (2.17) is a solution of Equation (2.14) for all r. In electrostatics with k = 0 the Greens function in Equation (2.17) becomes 1/|x x | as it should be for the potential of an electric charge. So if you did not study the Greens function formalism in electrostatics, you now know enough to solve Poissons equation as well.

2.2.3 Solution of the Schrodinger Equation

We can now write down the solution of Equation (2.11) using Equation (2.15) and Equation (2.17) and the denition in Equation (2.12) of (x) s (x) = 1 2m 4 d3 x eik|xx | V (x ) (x ) |x x | (2.24)

and this expression for s (x) can be substituted in Equation (2.9) to get (x) = eikx 2m 4 d3 x eik|xx | V (x ) (x ) |x x | (2.25)

The solution is not really a solution because the unknown function (x) appears on both sides of Equation (2.25). Note the manner in which x and x appear in Equation (2.25). We see that if V (x) = 0 then s (x) = 0 and thus f ( , ) = 0 in Equation (2.1) and (x) = exp(ik x), representing the incident plane wave without any scattering. This gives us a clue on how to proceed iteratively when V (x) is not zero but small. A small V (x) leads to a small s (x) relative to exp(ik x). The rst iteration consists of substituting (x) of Equation (2.25) in place of in the integrand on the right-hand side of Equation (2.25) and calculating a new and improved (x). The second iteration is obtained when we substitute this new (x) in place of in the integrand and calculate a newer further improved (x) and substituting it in the integrand, and so on. Each step in this iterative process should improve (x) over the result of the previous step as long as V (x) is small and the procedure converges. This might be expected to be the case because each step increases the power of V (x) by one and we assumed that V (x) is small. During this process we introduce an additional integration for each iteration. Each integral must have its own integration variable. To this end we rename the integration variable x in Equation (2.25) x1 to get (x) = eikx + 2m 4 d3 x1 G(x, x1 ) V (x1 ) (x1 ) (2.26)