Microscopic optical potential from chiral effective field theory

TL;DR

This paper develops a microscopic optical potential based on chiral effective field theory to predict proton-nucleus scattering, comparing results with phenomenological models and experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining chiral two- and three-body forces to derive energy-dependent optical potentials for nuclear scattering.

Findings

Good agreement with experimental scattering data

Microscopic potentials outperform phenomenological models in certain cases

Provides a consistent framework for nuclear reaction calculations

Abstract

We formulate a microscopic optical potential from chiral two- and three-body forces. The real and imaginary central terms of the optical potential are obtained from the nucleon self-energy in infinite matter, while the real spin-orbit term is extracted from a nuclear energy density functional constructed from the density matrix expansion using the same chiral potential. The density-dependent optical potential is then folded with the nuclear density distributions for selected Calcium isotopes resulting in energy-dependent nucleon-nucleus optical potentials from which we study proton-nucleus elastic scattering cross sections calculated using the TALYS reaction code. We compare the results of the microscopic calculations to phenomenological models and experimental data.