Strength functions for fragmented doorway states

Coupling a strongly excited “doorway state” to weak “hallway states” distributes its strength into micro-resonances seen in differential cross sections taken with very good energy resolution. The distribution of strength is shown to be revealed by reduced widths of the K-matrix rather than by the imaginary part of poles of the S-matrix. Different strength functions (SF) constructed by averaging the K-matrix widths are then investigated to determine their dependences on energy and on parameters related to averages of microscopic matrix elements. A new sum rule on the integrated strength of these SF is derived and used to show that different averaging procedures actually distribute the strength differently. Finally, it is shown that the discontinuous summed strength defines spreading parameters for the doorway state only in strong coupling, where it approximates the indefinite integral of the continuous SF of MacDonald-Mekjian-Kerman-De Toledo Piza. A new method of “parametric continuation” is used to relate a discontinuous sliding box-average, or a finite sum, of discrete terms to a continuous function.