Theory of hyperspherical Sturmians for three-body reactions

In this paper we present a theory to describe three-body reactions. Fragmentation processes are studied by means of the Schrodinger equation in hyperspherical coordinates. The three-body wave function is written as a sum of two terms. The first one defines the initial channel of the collision while the second one describes the scattered wave, which contains all the information about the collision process. The dynamics is ruled by an nonhomogeneous equation with a driven term related to the initial channel and to the three-body interactions. A basis set of functions with outgoing behavior at large values of hyperradius is introduced as products of angular and radial hyperspherical Sturmian functions. The scattered wave is expanded on this basis and the nonhomogeneous equation is transformed into an algebraic problem that can be solved by standard matrix methods. To be able to deal with general systems, discretization schemes are proposed to solve the angular and radial Sturmian equations. This procedure allows these discrete functions to be connected with the hyperquatization algorithm. Finally, the fragmentation transition amplitude is derived from the asymptotic limit of the scattered wave function.