A global microscopic description of nucleon-nucleus scattering with quantified uncertainties

Understand

We develop for the first time a microscopic global nucleon-nucleus optical potential with quantified uncertainties suitable for analyzing nuclear reaction experiments at next-generation rare-isotope beam facilities.

• Within the improved local density approximation and without any adjustable parameters, we begin by computing proton-nucleus and neutron-nucleus optical potentials from a set of five nuclear forces from chiral effective field theory for 1800 target nuclei in the mass range 12 $\leq$ A $\leq$ 242 for energies between 0 MeV $<$ E $\lesssim$ 150 MeV.
• We then parameterize a global optical potential for each chiral force that depends smoothly on the projectile energy as well as the target nucleus mass number and isospin asymmetry.
• Uncertainty bands for elastic scattering observables are generated from a full covariance analysis of the parameters entering in the description of our global optical potential and benchmarked against existing experimental data for stable target nuclei.