Microscopic Optical Potential from Chiral Effective Field Theory

We formulate a microscopic optical potential from chiral two- and three-body forces. The real and imaginary central terms of the optical potential are obtained from the nucleon self-energy in infinite matter, while the real spin–orbit term is extracted from a nuclear energy density functional constructed from the density matrix expansion using the same chiral potential. The density-dependent optical potential is then folded with the nuclear density distributions for selected Calcium isotopes resulting in energy-dependent nucleon–nucleus optical potentials from which we study proton–nucleus elastic scattering cross sections calculated using the TALYS reaction code. We compare the results of the microscopic calculations to phenomenological models and experimental data.