Elastic and inelastic proton scattering to the $2_1^{+}$ states of the neutron-rich argon isotopes ${}^{42}\mathrm{Ar}$ and ${}^{44}\mathrm{Ar}$ have been measured in inverse kinematics with a beam energy of 33 MeV/nucleon. Phenomenological distorted wave Born approximation calculations are compared with the data and quadrupole deformation parameters of $|{\beta }_2|=0.32\mathrm{}\pm 0.05$ and $|{\beta }_2|=0.31\mathrm{}\pm 0.05$ are extracted for the $2_1^{+}$ states in ${}^{42}\mathrm{Ar}$ and ${}^{44}\mathrm{Ar},$ respectively. A consistent microscopic proton scattering analysis has been applied to all even-even argon isotopes from $A=36\mathrm{}$ to $A=44.\mathrm{}$ This analysis used microscopic collective model densities and a modified Jeukenne-Lejeune-Mahaux nucleon-nucleon effective interaction. The predicted cross sections agree very well with the experimental data, suggesting this microscopic analysis as a tool to test the structure of nuclei far from stability.

• Received 14 June 2000

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.63.014604