Repulsive nature of optical potentials for high-energy heavy-ion scattering

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the energy-dependent transition of heavy-ion optical potentials from attraction to repulsion around 200-300 MeV/nucleon, emphasizing the role of tensor forces and elastic-scattering angular distributions.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the energy dependence of optical potentials and elastic scattering in $^{12}$C + $^{12}$C, highlighting the tensor force's influence and proposing experimental verification.

Findings

Tensor force significantly affects the potential's energy dependence.

The transition from attraction to repulsion occurs around 200-300 MeV/nucleon.

Elastic scattering angular distributions evolve characteristically with energy.

Abstract

The recent works by the present authors predicted that the real part of heavy-ion optical potentials changes its character from attraction to repulsion around the incident energy per nucleon E/A = 200 - 300 MeV on the basis of the complex G-matrix interaction and the double-folding model (DFM) and revealed that the three-body force plays an important role there. In the present paper, we have precisely analyzed the energy dependence of the calculated DFM potentials and its relation to the elastic-scattering angular distributions in detail in the case of the $^{12}$C + $^{12}$C system in the energy range of E/A = 100 - 400 MeV. The tensor force contributes substantially to the energy dependence of the real part of the DFM potentials and plays an important role to lower the attractive-to-repulsive transition energy. The nearside and farside (N/F) decomposition of the elastic-scattering amplitudes clarifies the close relation between the attractive-to-repulsive transition of the potentials and the characteristic evolution of the calculated angular distributions with the increase of the incident energy. Based on the present analysis, we propose experimental measurements of the predicted strong diffraction phenomena of the elastic-scattering angular distribution caused by the N/F interference around the attractive-to-repulsive transition energy together with the reduced diffractions below and above the transition energy.