Phenomenological and Theoretical Optical Potentials

TL;DR

This paper reviews phenomenological and theoretical optical potentials used in nuclear reaction calculations, highlighting recent developments including a global relativistic folding potential and a non-relativistic chiral potential for elastic scattering.

Contribution

It introduces two recent theoretical optical potentials: a global relativistic folding potential and a non-relativistic chiral potential, expanding the tools for nuclear reaction modeling.

Findings

Relativistic folding optical potential effective in quasi-elastic lepton-nucleus scattering

Chiral N4LO potential successfully applied to elastic proton-nucleus scattering

Phenomenological potentials have limitations in interpretability

Abstract

The optical potential is a powerful instrument for calculations on a wide variety of nuclear reactions, in particular, for quasi-elastic lepton-nucleus scattering. Phenomenological optical potentials are successful in the description of data but may produce uncertainties in the interpretation of the results. Two recent theoretical optical potentials are presented: a global relativistic folding optical potential, that has been employed in relativistic models for quasi-elastic lepton-nucleus scattering, and a non relativistic optical potential derived from nucleon-nucleon chiral potentials at fourth order (N4LO), that has been applied to elastic proton-nucleus scattering.