The dynamic polarization potential from Coulomb dissociation of deuterons and 3He

Abstract

We evaluate the target and the energy dependence of the Coulomb dissociation cross section for deuterons and 3He nuclei in a first-order Coulomb excitation theory along with a strong absorption treatment to account for the nuclear interaction. Dipole transitions are found to be dominating in both the cases. For deuterons, the Coulomb dissociation is comparable to the nuclear break-up, even at high energies for heavy nuclei, whereas it is quite small for 3He. We argue that this should imply a substantial long-range absorptive potential to simulate the dynamic polarization potential for deuterons, which may improve the predictions of the prior-form distorted-wave Born approximation theory for deuteron break-up.