Research Interests

The understanding of the scattering of projectiles from atomic nuclei provides important information about the structure of nuclei, the mechanisms by which they are excited and the forces which hold them together. In our work, the framework for understanding nuclear scattering processes is microscopic at the nucleon level. It is well known that this picture is oversimplified for describing reactions in kinematic regimes where subnucleonic degrees of freedom become important. Typically, these regimes are realized at relatively large projectile momenta where the de Broglie wavelength is comparable to or smaller than the size of the nucleon. In principle, the departure of measured observables from nucleon-sector predictions signals the onset of subnucleonic degrees of freedom. Reliable calculations within the nucleon-only sector are therefore crucial in order to identify genuine departures from nucleon-sector physics. The most sophisticated calculations by our group have been full-folding calculations for the elastic scattering of nucleons in which the scattering process is mediated by nucleon-nucleon interactions and the dynamical degrees of freedom of the interacting pair of nucleons are treated in detail. The full-folding procedure has been generalized to describe nucleon charge-exchange reactions (on target nuclei with unequal numbers of protons and neutrons) which manifestly requires a transfer of isospin and therefore compliments our work on elastic scattering.

Other recent work has emphasized the role of spin observables in the determination of the spin and isospin composition of the continuum observed in the inelastic scattering of protons and deuterons. A related effort has been directed towards understanding multistep direct nuclear reactions. Work on reactions induced by radioactive ion beams is expected to form an increasingly important part of my research.

Recent Publications

H.F. Arellano, F.A. Brieva and W.G. Love, "In-medium Full-Folding Optical Model for Nucleon-Nucleus Elastic Scattering," Phys. Rev. C 52, 301 (1995).

M.B. Chadwick et al., "Open Problems in Quantum-Mechanical Approaches to Multistep Direct Nuclear Reactions," Acta Physica Slovaca 49, 365 (1999).

K. Nakayama and W.G. Love, "Spin Observables and the Determination of the Parity of Theta+ in Photoproduction Reactions," Phys. Rev. C70, 012201(R):1-5(2004).

H.F. Arellano and W.G. Love,  "Nuclear Halo Structure from Quasielastic Charge-Exchange Reactions,"  Proceedings of International Conference on Baryons04, Nucl. Phys. A 755, 527c-530c (2005).