Systematic study of the propagation of uncertainties to transfer observables

TL;DR

This paper systematically investigates how parametric uncertainties in optical potentials affect transfer reaction predictions, revealing small uncertainties that grow with beam energy and emphasizing the importance of correlations between different potential parameters.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of uncertainty propagation in transfer reactions using the KDUQ optical potential, highlighting the significance of parameter correlations.

Findings

Uncertainties in transfer observables are about 5-10%, comparable to experimental errors.

Correlations between bound state and optical potential uncertainties are significant.

Uncertainty magnitude increases with beam energy and is relatively insensitive to final state properties.

Abstract

A systematic study of parametric uncertainties in transfer reactions is performed using the recently developed uncertainty quantified global optical potential (KDUQ). We consider reactions on the doubly-magic spherical nucleus $^{48}$Ca and explore the dependence of the predicted $(d,p)$ angular distribution uncertainties at different beam energies and for different properties of the final single-particle state populated by the reaction. Our results show that correlations between the uncertainties associated with the bound state potential and with the optical potentials may be important for correctly determining the uncertainty in the transfer cross sections (in our case, these do not add in quadrature). In general, we find small uncertainties in the predicted transfer observables: half-width of the 68% credible interval is roughly $5-10$%, which is comparable to the experimental error on the transfer data. Finally, our results show that the relative magnitude of the parametric uncertainty in transfer observables increases with the beam energy and does not depend strongly on the properties of the final state.