Optical potentials of halo and weakly bound nuclei Original Research Article

The optical potential of halo and weakly bound nuclei has a long range part due to the coupling to breakup that damps the elastic scattering angular distributions at all angles for which the effect of the nuclear interaction is felt. In charge exchange reactions leading to a final state with a halo nucleus, the surface potential is responsible for a strong reduction in the absolute cross section. We show how the halo effect can be simply estimated semiclassically and related to the properties of the halo wave function. Assuming an exponential tail for the imaginary surface potential we show that the most important parameter is the diffuseness α of the potential which is directly related to the decay length γi of the initial wave function by α≈(2γi)−1.