Channel coupling effect and important role of imaginary part of coupling potential for high-energy heavy-ion scatterings

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the coupling effects, especially the imaginary part of the coupling potential, influence high-energy heavy-ion scattering, revealing significant effects on elastic and inelastic scattering distributions around 100-400 MeV/u.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the energy dependence of channel coupling effects and highlights the important role of the imaginary part of the coupling potential in heavy-ion scatterings.

Findings

Large channel coupling effect observed in elastic cross sections.

Imaginary part of the coupling potential significantly affects scattering distributions.

Dynamical polarization potential elucidates the coupling effects.

Abstract

The recent works by the present authors and their collaborator predicted that the real part of heavy-ion optical potentials changes its character from attraction to repulsion around the incident energy per nucleon $E =$ 200 -- 300 MeV/u 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 analyzed the energy dependence of the coupling effect with the Microscopic Coupled Channel (MCC) method and its relation to the elastic and inelastic-scattering angular distributions in detail in the case of the $^{12}$C + $^{12}$C system in the energy range of $E =$ 100 -- 400 MeV/u. The large channel coupling effect is clearly seen in the elastic cross section although the incident energies are enough high. The dynamical polarization potential is derived to investigate the channel coupling effect. Moreover, we analyze the effect of imaginary part of the coupling potential on elastic and inelastic cross sections.