Optical potentials for inelastic scattering from many-body targets

The standard text book Green's function possesses a self-energy that is known to be an optical potential for elastic scattering. The introduction of an optical potential reduces the complex many-body scattering problem into a tractable one-body problem. In this paper inelastic Green's functions are introduced and discussed which possess self-energies that are optical potentials for inelastic scattering. If the projectile is indistinguishable from particles comprising the target, intriguing aspects arise even for noninteracting particles.