Abstract
We present a theoretical analysis of recently published experimental data for the elastic scattering of protons from the helium isotopes and at energies near 700 MeV per nucleon. The analysis treats the few-body degrees of freedom of these light neutron-rich nuclei explicitly and is developed in terms of three- and five-body wave functions for and , respectively. Comparisons of calculations with the data show that the sizes of the He nuclei consistent with such an analysis are larger by about 0.2 fm than those deduced from a more approximate procedure in which the structure of the weakly bound nuclei enters only through an assumed nuclear matter density.
- Received 18 November 1997
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.57.1846
©1998 American Physical Society