FORMAL DERIVATION OF AN EXPRESSION FOR THE CROSS-SECTION FOR RESONANT FORMATION OF DT-MU IN THE MUON-CATALYZED FUSION CYCLE

A key process in the muon catalysed fusion cycle is a low energy collision of tmu with a D2 molecule which leads, at appropriate incident energies, to the formation of a resonant complex containing ddmu or dtmu. In this letter, an outline is given of a formal derivation in which elements of Feshbach's treatment of resonances and Chan and Fraser's coupled scattering approach to positronium formation in e+H scattering in the region below the first target excitation threshold are used to obtain an expression for the p-wave cross section for resonant dtmu formation. The result is similar to the Breit-Wigner formula. Full details of the calculation will be published elsewhere.