Heavy-ion optical and polarization potentials at intermediate energies in a Glauber model

Abstract Heavy-ion optical potentials at intermediate energies ( E / A ≈50–1000 MeV) are derived from a coupled-channel approach a la Glauber which simultaneously describes both elastic and reaction channels. The model, in addition to the “bare” elastic potential, provides the contribution arising from the coupling to the excited channels. The “bare” potential is given in the form of a folding of the nuclear ground-state densities with an eikonalized elementary t -matrix operator in r -space. At variance with the standard approaches appropriate to the energy range around the Coulomb barrier, in our scheme all terms of the optical potentials are complex functions, and their energy dependence as well as the balance between real and imaginary parts are essentially governed by the behaviour of the microscopic nucleon-nucleon scattering at the corresponding energy.