Microscopic optical potentials for medium-mass isotopes derived at the first order of the Watson multiple scattering theory

TL;DR

This paper presents a first-principles calculation of optical potentials for nucleon elastic scattering on medium-mass isotopes using chiral Hamiltonians and ab initio methods, showing good agreement with experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining ab initio Green's function theory with chiral interactions to derive optical potentials for medium-mass isotopes.

Findings

Optical potentials agree well with experimental data at 65-200 MeV.

Studied the evolution of scattering observables across isotopic chains.

Analyzed dependence on folding interaction and target density convergence.

Abstract

We perform a first-principle calculation of optical potentials for nucleon elastic scattering off medium-mass isotopes. Fully based on a saturating chiral Hamiltonian, the optical potentials are derived by folding nuclear density distributions computed with ab initio self-consistent Green's function theory with a nucleon-nucleon $t$ matrix computed with a consistent chiral interaction. The dependence on the folding interaction as well as the convergence of the target densities are investigated. Numerical results are presented and discussed for differential cross sections and analyzing powers, with focus on elastic proton scattering off Calcium and Nickel isotopes. Our optical potentials generally show a remarkable agreement with the available experimental data for laboratory energies in the range 65-200 MeV. We study the evolution of the scattering observables with increasing proton-neutron asymmetry by computing theoretical predictions of the cross section and analyzing power over the Calcium and Nickel isotopic chains.