Usefulness of the distorted wave bound-state approximation in reaction theory

The bound state approximation (BSA) restricts the intermediate state propagation of a manybody system to specified two-cluster configurations. This approximation was tested recently by applying it to the calculation of the binding energy of the three-boson Amado model. The method was found to give poor results. We have tested the distorted wave BSA on the same model and found that the distortion can produce a great improvement.