Microscopic optical potentials from a Greens function approach

TL;DR

This paper develops a microscopic approach to derive optical potentials using Green's functions and nuclear structure models, aiming to improve predictions for unstable isotopes in nuclear reactions.

Contribution

It presents an explicit implementation of the Feshbach formalism combined with Green's function methods for microscopic optical potential derivation.

Findings

The new optical potential accurately reproduces elastic scattering data for n+24Mg.

Numerical tools for nonlocal Green's functions are developed and demonstrated.

The approach offers a promising path for predicting reactions involving unstable isotopes.

Abstract

Optical potentials are a standard tool in the study of nuclear reactions, as they describe the interaction between a target nucleus and a projectile. The use of phenomenological optical potentials built using experimental data on stable isotopes is widespread. Although successful in their dedicated domain, it is unclear whether these phenomenological potentials can provide reliable predictions for unstable isotopes. To address this problem, optical potentials based on microscopic nuclear structure input calculations prove to be crucial and are an important current line of research. In this work we present an explicit implementation of the Feshbach formalism for the systematic derivation of optical potentials using input from nuclear structure models. Numerical tools for the derivation of Green's functions associated with nonlocal potentials are presented. The new optical potential, based on the valence shell model, is applied to the calculations of n+24Mg elastic scattering and yields a close agreement with the experimental data.