Dirac Phenomenological Analyses of Unpolarized Proton Inelastic Scattering from $^{22}$Ne

TL;DR

This paper analyzes 800 MeV proton inelastic scattering from $^{22}$Ne using Dirac phenomenology, revealing surface-peaked potentials and weaker couplings compared to $^{20}$Ne, emphasizing the importance of multistep effects.

Contribution

It introduces a relativistic Dirac coupled channel approach with phenomenological optical potentials to analyze inelastic scattering from $^{22}$Ne, highlighting the role of multistep couplings.

Findings

Surface-peaked phenomena observed in effective central potentials.

Deformation parameters for $^{22}$Ne are smaller than those for $^{20}$Ne.

Multistep channel coupling significantly affects the $4^+$ state excitation.

Abstract

Unpolarized 800 MeV proton inelastic scatterings from an s-d shell nucleus $^{22}$Ne are analyzed using phenomenological optical potentials in the Dirac coupled channel formalism. The first-order rotational collective model is used to obtain the transition optical potentials for the low lying excited collective states that belong to the ground state rotational band of the nucleus. The optical potential parameters of Woods-Saxon shape and the deformation parameters of the excited states are varied phenomenologically using the sequential iteration method to reproduce the experimental differential cross section data. The effective central and spin-orbit optical potentials are obtained by reducing the Dirac equations to the Schr\"odinger-like second-order differential equations and the surface-peaked phenomena are observed at the real effective central potentials when the scattering from $^{22}$Ne is considered. The obtained deformation parameters of the excited states are compared with those of the nonrelativistic calculations and another s-d shell nucleus $^{20}$Ne. The deformation parameters for the $2^+$ and the $4^+$ states of the ground state rotational band at the nucleus $^{22}$Ne are found to be smaller than those of $^{20}$Ne, indicating that the couplings of those states to the ground state are weaker at the nucleus $^{22}$Ne compared to those at the nucleus $^{20}$Ne. The multistep channel coupling effect is confirmed to be important for the $4^+$ state excitation of the ground state rotational band at the proton inelastic scattering from the s-d shell nucleus $^{22}$Ne.