Description of inelastic scattering between heavy ions in the Glauber model.

The optical limit of the Glauber model is used for the description of inelastic processes in heavy-ion reactions at intermediate energies. Different prescriptions are investigated to obtain the inelastic scattering amplitude from the corresponding microscopic nucleon-nucleon amplitude. Besides the standard one in which the target excitation is ascribed to a projectile-nucleon collision and contributions from multiple-scattering processes are preliminarily summed to produce the elastic projectile-nucleon amplitude, we suggest the alternative approach in which a single nucleon-nucleon collision causes the inelastic transition. In all cases the formalism is modified to take into account the deflection of the classical orbits due to the strong repulsive Coulomb field. Parameter-free predictions for the inelastic excitation, based on experimental nucleon-nucleon total cross sections and standard densities, show a remarkable agreement with both experiment and distorted-wave Born approximation calculations.