Electric quadrupole and hexadecupole nuclear excitations from the perspectives of electron scattering and modern shell-model theory

Shell-model wave functions obtained from a complete, unified treatment of the structure of the positive parity states in nuclei between ¹⁶O and ⁴⁰Ca are used to calculate the features of inelastic electron scattering to 2+ and 4+ states in this region. These predictions of E2 and E4 form factors, and the corresponding elastic scattering predictions, are compared with the collected experimental data which are available on this topic. The dependence of the calculated results upon alternate models for single-nucleon wave functions and core-polarization transition densities is investigated, as is the consistency between the (e,e′) measurements and the analogous B(E2) measurements.