Postacceleration effects in the Coulomb dissociation of neutron halo nuclei

Abstract

We study the breakup of one-neutron halo nuclei in the Coulomb field of a target nucleus. In the post-form distorted wave Born approximation theory of this reaction, with only Coulomb distortions in the entrance and outgoing channels, an analytic solution for the breakup T matrix is known. We study this T matrix and the corresponding cross sections numerically. This formula can be related to the first order semiclassical treatment of the electromagnetic dissociation. This theory contains the electromagnetic interaction between the core and the target nucleus to all orders. We show that higher order effects (including postacceleration) are small in the case of higher beam energies and forward scattering. We investigate the beam energy dependence of the postacceleration effects. They are found to be quite important for smaller beam energies (slow collisions), but almost negligible at larger ones.