Microscopic Calculations of Nucleon-Nucleus Scattering at Intermediate Energies

In this work some formal aspects of a non-relativistic model of the optical potential are reviewed and applications are made to proton-nucleus elastic scattering at intermediate energies. Special consideration is given to the treatment of off-energy-shell effects in the nucleon-nucleon (NN) effective interaction and their interplay with the target mixed density by retaining the full-folding structure of the optical potential. Applications are made by using free t-matrices based on realistic NN potentials. Energy dependence and knock-on exchange terms of the t-matrix are included explicitly. Significant differences are observed between observables calculated from the full-folding model and conventional trho~imations to it. At proton energies near and below ~ 400 MeV the full-folding model provides a superior description of the data compared to trho approximations. These results demonstrate the importance of accurate treatments of the off-shell behavior of effective interactions as well as the mixed density in calculating optical potentials for intermediate energy nucleon scattering. A simplified expression for the full-folding optical potential is obtained based on an approximation of the target mixed-density. This simplified optical potential enables one to study nuclear densities of closed shell nuclei using intermediate energy nucleon scattering. The interplay between the local density, non-locality of the mixed-density and off-shell degrees of freedom in the full -folding approach to nucleon scattering is made relatively transparent.