A method for experimental determination of the density of nuclear matter.

Author(s)

Marcos Aurelio Gonzalez Alvarez

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Instituto de Física (IF/SBI)
• Defense date: 2002-12-12

Examining board members

Luiz Carlos Chamon; Nelson Carlin Filho; Diógenes Galetti; Paulo Roberto Silveira Gomes; Rubens Lichtenthaler Filho

• Advisor: Luiz Carlos Chamon

Abstract

An unfolding method is proposed to extract ground-state nuclear matter densities from heavy-ion elastic scattering data analyses at low (sub-barrier) and intermediate energies. The consistency of the results was fully checked. The method is a powerful tool to obtain ground-state nuclear matter densities, particularly at the surface region where the difference between densities of exotic and stable neighbor nuclei is very emphasized. Precise elastic scattering cross sections were measured for the systems 16O + 40Ca, 120Sn, with the aim of helping the construction of an experimental systematics for the real part of the nuclear interaction, and to obtain the experimental ground-state nuclear matter density for the 16O nucleus. As a complement, this work presents: i-) A theoretical systematics for nuclear densities which was performed for the whole mass region throughout the periodic table, ii-) the non-local model, developed to describe the energy dependence of the real part of the nuclear interaction; iii-) a new representation for the absorption of flux due to the reaction channels. This framework has allowed us to obtain a systematization of the optical potential from a consistent heavy-ion elastic scattering data analysis at low and intermediate energies. This analysis resulted a remarkable prediction for a very large elastic scattering cross section data set using a global and fundamental parameter-free model for the optical potential. (AU)