Interpretation of airy minima in 16O+16O and 16O+12C elastic scattering in terms of a barrier-wave/internal-wave decomposition

The observation of refractive effects in ¹⁶O+¹⁶O and ¹⁶O+¹²C elastic scattering data has definitively established the fact that the optical potential for some light heavy-ion systems is relatively transparent and that its real part is deep. Most of the interpretations of the rainbow features of these data rely on the so-called nearside-farside decomposition of the scattering amplitude. Starting from recent optical model analyses of ¹⁶O+¹⁶O and ¹⁶O+¹²C elastic scattering around 100 MeV incident energy as an example, we present an alternative interpretation based on the barrier-wave/internal-wave decomposition first proposed by Brink and Takigawa. This method, which complements the nearside-farside approach, demonstrates clearly the exceptional transparency of the ¹⁶O+¹⁶O, and to a lesser extent ¹⁶O+¹²C, interactions at the investigated energies and makes possible the extraction of the two contributions whose interference explains the Airy oscillations seen in the farside amplitude.