Elastic interaction of protons with stable and exotic light nuclei

Abstract

The proton elastic-scattering data on ${}^{4,6,8}$He and ${}^{6,7,9,11}$Li nuclei are analyzed over a wide range of incident energies below 160 MeV/nucleon using the single-folding optical model. The real part of the folding optical potential (OP) is calculated using the M3Y nucleon-nucleon interaction and microscopic densities. The Green's function Monte Carlo density is used for the stable nuclei, whereas the large-scale shell model density is used for the exotic nuclei. The high-energy approximation calculation is used for the volume imaginary OP. The spin-orbit and surface imaginary parts of the OP are constructed from the derivatives of the real and volume imaginary parts of the folded potentials, respectively. The volume integrals of the OPs are studied, and it is found that they show clear dependencies on energy and root-mean-square radii. Hence, it can be considered an important constraint for the choice of the optical potential. A new empirical formula is assumed and successfully applied for the real volume integrals. The obtained results of the differential and the reaction cross sections are in good agreement with the available experimental data. In general, this OP with few and limited fitting parameters, which have systematic behavior with incident energy, successfully describes the proton elastic-scattering data with stable and exotic light nuclei at energies below 160 MeV/nucleon.