The phenomenological optical potential parameters are known to vary with incident energy due to sources of nonlocalities in the nucleon-nucleus elastic scattering process. Here we investigate the effect of one source, which is coupling the ground-state elastic channel to collective inelastic excitations on the energy dependence of the optical potential parameters. For incident energies in the range 10–70 MeV, we considered elastic and inelastic nucleon scattering from light, medium, and heavy nuclei ranging from ${}^6\mathrm{Li}$ to ${}^{208}\mathrm{Pb}$. The potential parameters were first determined by fitting the elastic angular distributions only. Then we included coupling to collective excitation channels and determined the potential parameters that reproduced the elastic and inelastic angular distribution data simultaneously. Our results show that coupling to inelastic excitations reduces the energy variations of the potential parameters compared to that of the elastic scattering case. In particular, the our best fit values for the real part of the spin-orbit term are highly stable as a function of energy. The values of the surface imaginary term are not only more stable but are also reduced compared to the elastic case. The reduction is a direct consequence of the channel coupling accounting explicitly for part of the flux removed from the elastic channel. In the fitting process we also searched for the best fit values of the deformation parameters. Our values compare well with the corresponding ones obtained in previous works. Finally, we used our best fit values for the potential and deformation parameters to theoretically predict the total elastic, total cross section, and polarization data. The predicted values are in very good agreement with the experimental data.

• Received 26 February 2016
• Revised 19 May 2016

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.93.064311