A Tale of the Scattering Lifetime and the Mean Free Path

Abstract

The idea of applying the scattering lifetime calculated from the imaginary part of the zero temperature elastic scattering cross-section to study a hidden self-consistent damping in two spaces of importance for non-equilibrium statistical mechanics is proposed. It is discussed its relation with the classical phase space from statistical mechanics and the configuration space from nonrelativistic quantum mechanics. This idea is contrasted with the mean free path values in three elastic collision regimes. The main exercise is to study the behavior of a self-consistent probabilistic distribution function in a space we have called the reduced phase space, since it is related to the scattering lifetime. This exercise has been solved in two unconventional superconductors, for which several calculations are discussed. One of them is to obtain the scattering phase shift from the inverse strength of an atomic potential and the other is to build several phases with different nodal configuration of the superconducting order parameter and show that the imaginary self-consistent part of the scattering cross-section is always positive for two compounds: the triplet strontium ruthenate and the singlet doped with strontium lanthanum cuprate when three models of superconducting order parameters are used: the quasi-point, the point and the line nodal cases. We finally compare the frequency dispersion in the anomalous skin effect with singular shapes of the Fermi surface with the frequency dispersion in the scattering lifetime and their respective mean free paths. This idea is useful because it intuitively explores the nonlocality of this type of hidden self-consistent damping for those incoherent fermionic quasiparticles.