Microscopic Optical Potential for Elastic Proton-Nucleus Scattering from Chiral Forces

TL;DR

This paper develops a microscopic optical potential based on chiral forces to describe elastic proton and antiproton-nucleus scattering, showing good agreement with experimental data and offering a theoretically grounded alternative to phenomenological models.

Contribution

It introduces a first-order microscopic optical potential derived from chiral NN forces for elastic scattering, extending the approach to antiproton interactions.

Findings

Good agreement with experimental scattering data

Microscopic OP performs comparably to phenomenological models

Applicable to both proton and antiproton scattering

Abstract

A microscopic optical potential (OP) is derived from NN chiral potentials at the first-order term within the spectator expansion of the multiple scattering theory and adopting the impulse approximation. The performances of our OP are compared with those of a phenomenological OP in the description of elastic proton scattering data on different isotopic chains. An analogous scheme is adopted to construct a microscopic OP for elastic antiproton-nucleus scattering. The results of our OPs are in reasonably good agreement with the experimental data, for both elastic proton and antiproton-nucleus scattering.