Exponential optical potentials for heavy-ion elastic scattering

Abstract

A detailed quantitative survey of the optical-model ambiguity in some particular cases shows a very wide range of equally good choices in the Woods-Saxon parameters and even some degree of indefiniteness in the magnitudes usually considered to be well-defined, like the strong absorption radius. In 16O + 208Pb elastic scattering we show that all the good real potentials agree over a given region rather than a point. A systematic use of (real and imaginary) exponential potentials can fit, in a less redundant form, a fairly sizable range of experimental data and lends itself to the construction of a general expression.