A Realistic Solvable Model for the Coulomb Dissociation of Neutron Halo Nuclei

As a model of a neutron halo nucleus we consider a neutron bound to an inert core by a zero range force. We study the breakup of this simple nucleus in the Coulomb field of a target nucleus. In the post-form DWBA (or, in our simple model CWBA (“Coulomb Wave Born Approximation”)) an analytic solution for the T-matrix is known. We study limiting cases of this T-matrix. As it should be, we recover the Born approximation for weak Coulomb fields (i.e., for the relevant Coulomb parameters much smaller than 1). For strong Coulomb fields, high beam energies, and scattering to the forward region we find a result which is very similar to the Born result. It is only modified by a relative phase (close to 0) between the two terms and a prefactor (close to 1). A similar situation exists for bremsstrahlung emission. This formula can be related to the first order semiclassical treatment of the electromagnetic dissociation. Since our CWBA model contains the electromagnetic interaction between the core and the target nucleus to all orders, this means that higher order effects (including postacceleration effects) are small in the case of high beam energies and forward scattering. Our model also predicts a scaling behavior of the differential cross section, that is, different systems (with different binding energies, beam energies and scattering angles) show the same dependence on two variables x and y.