Nonlocality in Deuteron Stripping Reactions

We propose a new method for the analysis of deuteron stripping reactions, A(d, p)B, in which the nonlocality of nucleon-nucleus interactions and three-body degrees of freedom are accounted for in a consistent way. The model deals with equivalent local nucleon potentials taken at an energy shifted by similar to 40 MeV from the "E-d/2" value frequently used in the analysis of experimental data, where E-d is the incident deuteron energy. The "E-d/2" rule lies at the heart of all three-body analyses of (d, p) reactions performed so far with the aim of obtaining nuclear structure properties such as spectroscopic factors and asymptotic normalization coefficients that are crucial for our understanding of nuclear shell evolution in neutron-and proton-rich regions of the nuclear periodic table and for predicting the cross sections of stellar reactions. The large predicted shift arises from the large relative kinetic energy of the neutron and proton in the incident deuteron in those components of the n + p + A wave function that dominate the (d, p) reaction amplitude. The large shift reduces the effective d - A potentials and leads to a change in predicted (d, p) cross sections, thus affecting the interpretation of these reactions in terms of nuclear structure. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.112501