Extended Glauber Theory and Its Application in Halo Nucleus Scattering

Abstract: We introduced an extended Glauber theory for a halo nucleus scattering, where the halo nucleons and the nuclear core were treated separately. Expressions of reaction and interaction cross sections of the halo nucleus scattering were derived. We took the halo structure of the projectile nucleus into account and adopted an improved optical limit approximation. In the framework of the extended Glauber theory, we studied the reaction cross section for the halo nucleus ¹⁴Be scattering on a target ¹²C. For comparison, the reaction cross sections of ¹²Be+¹²C were calculated as well. The density distribution of target ¹²C is taken from experiments, and those of the projectiles ¹²Be and ¹⁴Be were obtained by two methods. One is that the harmonic oscillator wave functions for ¹²Be and ¹⁴Be are used. The length of harmonic oscillator is adjusted to reproduce the reaction cross section of ¹²Be+¹²C at the high energy E=790MeV/u . The density distribution of ¹⁴Be was also calculated self-consistently in the relativistic mean field (RMF) theory, with a long tail wave functions for the two neutrons in ¹⁴Be. It was found that the calculated reaction cross sections for ¹²Be+¹²C at E=790MeV/u and E=56.5MeV/u were in good agreement with the experimental data no matter harmonic oscillator or RMF wave functions were used. In contrast, the experiments of the reaction cross sections for ¹⁴Be+ ¹²C could only be reproduced when the wave functions of two 2s_1/2 neutrons spreaded over with a long tail. It comes to a conclusion that two outside neutrons in ¹⁴Be form a halo structure.