Novel applications of the dispersive optical model

A review of recent developments of the dispersive optical model (DOM) is presented. Starting from the original work of Mahaux and Sartor, several necessary steps are developed and illustrated which increase the scope of the DOM allowing its interpretation as generating an experimentally constrained functional form of the nucleon self-energy. The method could therefore be renamed as the dispersive self-energy method. The aforementioned steps include the introduction of simultaneous fits of data for chains of isotopes or isotones allowing a data-driven extrapolation for the prediction of scattering cross sections and level properties in the direction of the respective drip lines. In addition, the energy domain for data was enlarged to include results up to 200 MeV where available. An important application of this work was implemented by employing these DOM potentials to the analysis of the (\textit{d,p}) transfer reaction using the adiabatic distorted wave approximation (ADWA). We review the fully non-local DOM potential fitted to ${}^{40}$Ca where elastic-scattering data, level information, particle number, charge density and high-momentum-removal $(e,e'p)$ cross sections obtained at Jefferson Lab were included in the analysis. An important consequence of this new analysis is the finding that the spectroscopic factor for the removal of valence protons in this nucleus comes out larger by about 0.15 than the results obtained from the NIKHEF analysis of their $(e,e'p)$ data. Another important consequence of this analysis is that it can shed light on the relative importance of two-body and three-body interactions as far as their contribution to the energy of the ground state is concerned through application of the energy sum rule.