Elastic scattering of heavy ions — The simplest interpretation?

Elastic scattering of heavy ions with incident energies well above the Coulomb barrier is predicted from a simple extension of the Glauber theory for high energy particle-nucleus scattering. The only parameters needed are the “measured” nuclear density distribution function and the measured forward amplitude for free nucleon-nucleon scattering. An extensive comparison between theory and experiment is presented. It is demonstrated that the nuclear absorption needed to reproduce the measured differential cross section for elastic scattering can be well reproduced by means of the measured free nucleon-nucleon total cross section and the nuclear density distribution as “measured” for instance by electron scattering. Remarkable agreement between theory and experiment is demonstrated.