Glauber-theory calculations of high-energy nuclear scattering observables using variational Monte Carlo wave functions

TL;DR

This paper performs ab initio Glauber theory calculations using variational Monte Carlo wave functions to accurately analyze high-energy nuclear scattering observables, demonstrating rapid convergence and excellent agreement with experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel combination of Glauber theory with variational Monte Carlo wave functions for high-energy nuclear scattering analysis.

Findings

Glauber calculations agree well with experimental data.

Cumulant expansion converges rapidly up to second order.

Method enables detailed analysis of high-energy nuclear experiments.

Abstract

Experiments using intermediate- to high-energy radioactive nuclear beams present numerous findings. Extracting important properties of physical observables relies on a firm theoretical analysis. Though Glauber theory is believed to work well, no convincing calculation has so far been done. We perform ab initio Glauber theory calculations of both elastic differential cross sections and total reaction cross sections for p+12C, 12C+12C, and 6He+12C systems. The wave functions of both 6He and 12C are generated by variational Monte Carlo calculations with spatial and spin-isospin correlations induced by realistic two- and three-nucleon potentials. Glauber's phase-shift function is computed by Monte Carlo integration up to all orders of nucleon-nucleon multiple scatterings. We show an excellent performance of the Glauber description to the selected data on the above systems. We also find that the cumulant expansion of the phase-shift function converges rapidly up to the second order for the above systems. This finding will open up interesting applications for the analysis of high-energy nuclear experiments.