The effect of spin-orbit distortion in quasi-elastic knock-out reactions

Abstract

The effect of spin-orbit distortion on the cross sections for knock-out reactions is formulated in the DWIA. It is shown that in the general case the (p, 2p) cross section for unpolarized protons does not factorize into the product of the free pp cross section and the distorted momentum distribution. The same is true for polarized protons and it is therefore not possible to relate the quantities appearing in the (p, 2p) cross section to the quantities appearing in the free pp cross section for polarized protons. The cross section for polarized protons can be expressed in terms of an effective polarization of the struck nucleon. In the symmetric geometry, the effective polarization is zero when spin-orbit distortion is omitted but has non-zero contributions when the spin-orbit effects are included.