Interplay of projectile breakup and target excitation in reactions induced by weakly-bound nuclei

TL;DR

This paper extends the CDCC formalism to include target excitation, applying it to various weakly-bound nuclear reactions, and demonstrates its accuracy in predicting inelastic scattering and breakup effects.

Contribution

The work introduces an extended CDCC method with a transformed oscillator basis to incorporate target excitation in weakly-bound nuclear reactions.

Findings

Extended CDCC accurately reproduces experimental inelastic cross sections.

Breakup effects cause smoothing in angular distributions.

Cross section magnitudes are largely unaffected by breakup.

Abstract

In this work, we reexamine the extension of the CDCC formalism to include target excitation and apply it to a variety of reactions to study the effect of breakup on inelastic cross sections. We use a transformed oscillator basis to discretize the continuum of the projectiles in the different reactions and use the extended CDCC method developed in this work to solve the resulting coupled differential equations. A new code has been developed to perform the calculations. Reactions 58Ni(d, d) 58Ni*, 24Mg(d, d) 24Mg* , 144Sm( 6Li, 6Li) 144Sm* and 9Be( 6Li, 6Li) 9Be* are studied. Satisfactory agreement is found between experimental data and extended CDCC calculations. The studied CDCC method is proved to be an accurate tool to describe target excitation in reactions with weakly-bound nuclei. Moderate effects of breakup on inelastic observables are found for the reactions studied. Cross section magnitudes are not modified much, but angular distributions present smoothing when opposed to calculations without breakup.