Core excitation in three-body nuclear reactions: Improved nucleon-core potential

TL;DR

This paper develops an improved nucleon-core optical potential for three-body nuclear reactions that includes core excitation, leading to more accurate predictions of reaction cross sections involving specific nuclear cores.

Contribution

It introduces a new method for constructing nucleon-core optical potentials that better fit experimental data by including core excitation effects.

Findings

Moderate increase in predicted cross sections.

Enhanced agreement with experimental data.

Applicability to reactions involving $^{10}{Be}$ and $^{24}{Mg}$ cores.

Abstract

Three-body nuclear reactions in two-nucleon plus core systems are described in the framework of exact scattering equations including the core excitation. A nucleon-core optical potential is constructed that can be easily adjusted to the reference potential and thereby to the experimental two-body data, if available. This constitutes an important improvement over the simple deformation of the potential used previously that violated the original fit to the data. Predictions for elastic, inelastic, and transfer reactions involving $^{10}{Be}$ and $^{24}{Mg}$ nuclear cores are obtained. The new optical potential leads to a moderate increase of cross sections.