Reaction theories for exotic nuclei

Abstract

This contribution discusses two important dynamical effects in the scattering of exotic beams. The first part deals proton breakup. The Coulomb interactions between the core and the target and the proton and the target are treated to all orders, including also the full multipole expansion of the Coulomb potential. The dynamics of proton Coulomb breakup is compared to that of an equivalent neutron of larger binding energy in order to elucidate the differences with the well understood neutron breakup mechanism. With respect to nuclear breakup it is found that a proton behaves exactly as a neutron of larger binding energy. The extra “effective energy” is due to the combined core-target Coulomb barrier. In Coulomb breakup we distinguish the effect of the core-target Coulomb potential (called recoil effect), with respect to which the proton behaves again as a more bound neutron, from the direct proton-target Coulomb potential. The latter gives cross sections about an order of magnitude larger than the recoil term. The two effects give rise to complicated interferences in the parallel momentum distributions. They are instead easily separable in the proton angular distributions which are therefore suggested as a very useful observable for future experimental studies. The second part has to do with the dynamics of one-neutron and oneproton removal from unstable nuclei with large asymmetry ΔS = Sn-Sp in the separation energies and incident energies below 80 MeV/nucleon. Strong non-sudden effects are observed in the case of deeply-bound-nucleon removal. The corresponding parallel momentum distributions exhibit an abrupt cutoff at high momentum that corresponds to an energy threshold occurring when the incident energy per particle is of comparable magnitude as the nucleon separation energy.