We present a general approach to analyzing elastic scattering for those situations where the incident beam is prepared as an incoherent ensemble of wave packets of a given arbitrary shape. Although wave packets, in general, are not stationary solutions of the Schrödinger equation, the analysis of elastic scattering data treats the scattering as a stationary-state problem. We thus must gate the wave packet, coherently distorting its shape in a manner consistent with the elastic condition. The resulting gated scattering amplitudes (e.g., reflection coefficients) thus are weighted coherent sums of the constituent plane-wave scattering amplitudes, with the weights determined by the shape of the incident wave packet as “filtered” by energy gating. We develop the gating formalism in general and apply it to the problem of neutron scattering from ruled gratings described by Majkrzak et al. in a companion paper. The required exact solution of the associated problem of plane-wave reflection from gratings also is derived.

• Received 6 September 2013

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.89.033852