Microscopic optical potential for proton elastic scattering off light exotic nuclei*

A microscopic optical potential (OP) for intermediate energies is derived using ab initio translationally invariant nonlocal one-body nuclear densities computed within the no-core shell model approach. Two- and three-nucleon chiral interactions are the only input of our calculations and are used to compute consistently the nuclear density and the nucleon-nucleon t matrix, which represent the two basic ingredients for the OP computation. The ground state local and nonlocal densities of several nuclei are calculated and applied to OP construction. The differential cross sections and the analyzing powers for the elastic proton scattering off these nuclei are then calculated for different values of the incident proton energy. The model is first tested on ⁴He, ¹²C, and ¹⁶O, and then is used to compute and compare the results for ^6,8He elastic scattering off polarized protons with the existing experimental data at 71 MeV/u. For ⁶He we also provide some predictions at 200 MeV/u that can be useful to interpret the data of a new experiment recently performed at RIKEN.