DWIA calculation of the 16O(α, 2α) reaction

The cross sections for the ¹⁶O(α, 2α) reaction have been calculated in the distorted wave impulse approximation. The influence of the optical potentials in the incident and final channels on the energy sharing distribution and the spectroscopic factors has been investigated. Optical potentials with small imaginary content are shown to fit both elastic scattering and the experimental data well and give a spectroscopic factor of 1.1; the contribution from the nuclear interior broadens the energy sharing distributions, in agreement with observations.