Evaluation of an eikonal model for 11Li-nucleus elastic scattering

An eikonal model is presented and evaluated for the elastic scattering of ¹¹Li from target nuclei. The ¹¹Li is treated as a ⁹Li+n+n three-body system interacting with the target through two-body ⁹Li- and neutron-target interactions. A careful quantitative investigation of the sensitivity of the calculated elastic-scattering cross section to the required theoretical inputs, the neutron and ⁹Li-target potentials and the assumed structure of the ¹¹Li, is presented. Since the structure of the ¹¹Li halo is not yet known, we investigate the extent to which elastic-scattering data are able to discriminate between different theoretical ¹¹Li wave-function models. We find that there is some sensitivity in the calculated elastic cross-section angular distributions to the degree of neutron correlations in the ¹¹Li wave function and that these are more significant at lower incident energies and on lighter targets. We conclude that the current uncertainty in the ⁹Li-target interaction is the major obstacle to elucidating the structure of ¹¹Li from present elastic-scattering data.