The uncorrelated scattering approximation for the scattering of weakly bound systems (Q5948489)

A new approach is proposed to describe the scattering of a weakly bound (halo) projectile nucleus by a heavy target nucleus. It comes from neglecting the correlation between the fragments in the region where the interaction with the target is important, and it leads to the conservation of the kinetic energy and angular momentum of each one of the fragments. The properties of hyper-spherical harmonics are used to match channel wave-functions into wave-functions which are characterised by definite values of the kinetic energy and angular momentum of the fragments. Elastic, inelastic and break-up \(S\)-matrices are obtained as an analytic combination involving the bound wave function of the projectile and the product of the \(S\)-matrices of the fragments.