Elastic proton scattering of medium mass nuclei from coupled-cluster theory

TL;DR

This paper uses coupled-cluster theory with chiral effective interactions to compute proton scattering on calcium-40, successfully predicting phase shifts and cross sections that align well with experimental data, demonstrating a new ab initio approach for nuclear scattering.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method combining coupled-cluster theory and phenomenological three-nucleon forces to compute scattering observables for medium-mass nuclei.

Findings

Good agreement of diffraction minima with experimental data

Overestimation of cross sections at large angles

Effective approach for low-energy proton scattering

Abstract

Using coupled-cluster theory and interactions from chiral effective field theory, we compute overlap functions for transfer and scattering of low-energy protons on the target nucleus 40-Ca. Effects of three-nucleon forces are included phenomenologically as in-medium two-nucleon interactions. Using known asymptotic forms for one-nucleon overlap functions we derive a simple and intuitive way of computing scattering observables such as elastic scattering phase shifts and cross sections. As a first application and proof-of-principle, we compute phase shifts and differential interaction cross sections at energies 9.6 MeV and 12.44 MeV and compare with experimental data. Our computed diffraction minima are in good agreement with experiment, while we tend to overestimate the cross sections at large scattering angles.