B3Y-FETAL effective interaction in the folding analysis of elastic scattering of $$^{16}$$ 16 O + $$^{16}$$ 16 O

In this paper, a new M3Y-type effective nucleon–nucleon interaction, derived based on the lowest order constrained variational approach (LOCV) and termed B3Y-Fetal, has been used in DDM3Y1, BDM3Y1, BDM3Y2, and BDM3Y3 density-dependent versions in a heavy ion (HI) optical potential based on four types of a real folded potential and a phenomenological Woods–Saxon imaginary potential to study the elastic scattering of the $$^{16}$$ O+ $$^{16}$$ O nuclear system within the framework of the optical model (OM) by computing the associated differential cross sections at various incident energies. The results of the folding analyses have shown the DDB3Y1-Fetal and BDB3Y1-Fetal, out of the four folded potentials, give a reasonably better description of the elastic data of the nuclear system. These best-fit folded potentials are followed, in performance, by the BDB3Y2-Fetal, with the BDB3Y3-Fetal potential coming last. This performance trend was also demonstrated by the optical potentials based on the M3Y-Reid interaction. Furthermore, the best-fit folded potentials, renormalized by a factor $$N_\text {R}$$ of approximately 0.9, have been shown to reproduce the energy dependence of the real optical potential for $$^{16}$$ O scattering found in previous optical model analyses creditably well. In excellent agreement with previous works, they have also been identified in this work to belong to the family of deep refractive potentials because they have been able to reproduce and consistently describe the evolution of Airy-like structures, at large scattering angles, observed in the $$^{16}$$ O scattering data at different energies. Finally, a comparison of the performances of B3Y-Fetal and M3Y-Reid effective interactions undertaken in this work has shown impressive agreement between them.