The Elastic Scattering of Deuterons by Deuterons

The concern of this work is the calculation of elastic scattering of deuterons by deuterons. The solution of the problem will be given in the usual center of mass system of coordinates, the conversion of results from this to the laboratory system being standard. Since the deuteron itself consists of a neutron and a proton, the problem is thus one of four bodies. The nuclear three body problem of the scattering of a neutron by a deuteron has been treated by previous authors and we will have occasion to employ methods used by these authors extending them to the four body problem. There are a number of possibilities in a deuteron-deuteron collision, most of them inelastic. However, we shall restrict ourselves to the elastic case