The electrostatic and nuclear parts of the nucleus-nucleus optical potential are constructed using the double folding model by taking into account nuclear charge and matter distributions, along with a suitably chosen effective nucleon-nucleon interaction. For nuclei with uniform charge distributions, a closed form expression for the electrostatic potential has been obtained earlier. This is found to be a very good approximation to the electrostatic potential corresponding to commonly known realistic charge distributions. Optical model calculations for the ${}_{}{}^{16}{}_{}{}^{}\mathrm{O}$-${}_{}{}^{16}{}_{}{}^{}\mathrm{O}$ system using this improved electrostatic potential are reported which provide a slightly better fit to elastic scattering data. The six dimensional integral for the nuclear part of the optical potential is reduced to a three dimensional integral for the case of spherically sysmmetric density distributions and this leads to substantial reduction in computations. In contrast with the electrostatic part, it is found that the nuclear part of the optical potential is quite sensitive to the shape of the density distributions. The optical potential constructed by the "double folding" method with only a single adjustable parameter corresponding to the strength of the imaginary part, is used to fit successfully ${}_{}{}^{12}{}_{}{}^{}\mathrm{C}$-${}_{}{}^{12}{}_{}{}^{}\mathrm{C}$ scattering data at $E_{\mathrm{lab}}=102.1\mathrm{}$ MeV.

NUCLEAR REACTIONS Optical model for nucleus-nucleus system, double folding model, realistic electrostatic potentials.

• Received 11 May 1978

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.19.848