The Use of the Scattering Phase Shift in Resonance Physics

The scattering phase shift encodes a good amount of physical information which can be used to study resonances from scattering data. Among others, it can be used to calculate the continuum density of states and the collision time in a resonant process. Whereas the first information can be employed to examine the evolution of unstable states directly from scattering data, the second one serves as a tool to detect resonances and their properties. We demonstrate both methods concentrating in the latter case on `exotic' resonances in ππ and πK scattering.