Abstract
Projectile fragmentation reactions are well suited to structure studies of weakly bound nuclei, but an accurate reaction theory is necessary to extract quantitative spectroscopic properties. We examine here the accuracy of the commonly used eikonal approximation for the nuclear-induced breakup of halo nuclei. Comparing to numerical solutions of the full time-dependent Schrödinger equation, we find that the eikonal remains fairly accurate for calculating breakup probabilities of halo nuclei even down to 20 MeV/nucleon, reproducing relative spectroscopic strengths to within a few percent. Absolute reaction probabilities tend to be underpredicted by the eikonal, which would make extracted spectroscopic strengths somewhat too high. We discuss other features that are seen in the full calculation but are missing in the eikonal approximation such as the “towing” mode.
- Received 23 March 2001
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.64.014608
©2001 American Physical Society