Interplay of projectile breakup and target excitation in reactions induced by weakly bound nuclei

Abstract

Background: Reactions involving weakly bound nuclei require formalisms able to deal with continuum states. The majority of these formalisms struggle to treat collective excitations of the systems involved. For continuum-discretized coupled channels (CDCC), extensions to include target excitation have been developed but have only been applied to a small number of cases.Purpose: In this work, we reexamine the extension of the CDCC formalism to include target excitation and apply it to a variety of reactions to study the effect of breakup on inelastic cross sections.Methods: We use a transformed oscillator basis to discretize the continuum of the projectiles in the different reactions and use the extended CDCC method developed in this work to solve the resulting coupled differential equations. A new code has been developed to perform the calculations.Results: Reactions $^{58}\mathrm{Ni}(d,d)^{58}\mathrm{Ni}^{*}, ^{24}\mathrm{Mg}(d,d)^{24}\mathrm{Mg}^{*}, ^{144}\mathrm{Sm}(^{6}\mathrm{Li},^{6}\mathrm{Li})^{144}\mathrm{Sm}^{*}$, and $^{9}\mathrm{Be}(^{6}\mathrm{Li},^{6}\mathrm{Li})^{9}\mathrm{Be}^{*}$ are studied. Satisfactory agreement is found between experimental data and extended CDCC calculations.Conclusions: The studied CDCC method has proven to be an accurate tool to describe target excitation in reactions with weakly bound nuclei. Moderate effects of breakup on inelastic observables are found for the reactions studied. Cross-section magnitudes are not modified much, but angular distributions present smoothing when opposed to calculations without breakup.