Compound Nucleus Contributions to the Optical Potential

Abstract

An ab‐initio calculation of the optical potential for neutron‐nucleus scattering has been performed by explicitly coupling the elastic channel to all the particle‐hole (p‐h) excitation states in the target. These p‐h states may be regarded as doorway states through which the flux flows to more complicated configurations, and (in the end) to long‐lived compound nucleus resonances. The random‐phase approximation (RPA) provides the linear combinations of p‐h states that include the residual interactions within the target, and we show preliminary results for elastic flux loss using both p‐h and RPA descriptions of target excitations.