Eur. Phys. J. C (2009) 62: 793-797
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-009-1059-2

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Potential scattering in Dirac field theory

¹ Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Campinas, P.O. Box 6065, SP, 13083-970, Campinas, Brazil
² Department of Physics, University of Salento and INFN, Lecce, P.O. BOX 193, CAP, 73100, Lecce, Italy

^* e-mail: deleo@ime.unicamp.br

Received: 20 March 2009
Revised: 16 April 2009
Published online: 27 May 2009

Abstract

We develop the potential scattering of a spinor within the context of perturbation field theory. As an application, we reproduce, up to second order in the potential, the diffusion results for a potential barrier of quantum mechanics. An immediate consequence is a simple generalization to arbitrary potential forms, a feature not possible in quantum mechanics.