We study the scattering of a matter-wave from an interacting system of bosons in an optical lattice, focusing on the strong-interaction regime. Analytical expressions for the many-body scattering cross section are derived from a strong-coupling expansion and a site-decoupling mean-field approximation, and compared to numerically obtained exact results. In the thermodynamic limit, we find a non-vanishing inelastic cross section throughout the Mott insulating regime, which decays quadratically as a function of the boson-boson interaction.
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