Scattering length and effective range of microscopic two-body potentials

Scattering processes are a fundamental way of experimentally probing distributions and properties of systems in several areas of physics. Considering two-body scattering at low energies, when the de Broglie wavelength is larger than the range of the potential, partial waves with high angular momentum are typically unimportant. The dominant contribution comes from l = 0 partial waves, commonly known as s-wave scattering. This situation is very relevant in atomic physics, e.g. cold atomic gases, and nuclear physics, e.g. nuclear structure and matter. This manuscript is intended as a pedagogical introduction to the topic while covering a numerical approach to compute the desired quantities. We introduce low-energy scattering with particular attention to the concepts of scattering length and effective range. These two quantities appear in the effective-range approximation, which universally describes low-energy processes. We outline a numerical procedure for calculating the scattering length and effective range of spherically symmetric two-body potentials. As examples, we apply the method to the spherical well, modified Pöschl-Teller, Gaussian, and Lennard-Jones potentials. We hope to provide the tools so students can implement similar calculations and extend them to other potentials.