Coupled-channel description of inelastic scattering from soft nuclei

A coupled-channel formalism for describing inelastic hadron scattering from soft nuclei is derived. This formalism, applicable up to at least intermediate energies, employs collective many-body wave functions built from constrained Hartree-Fock or Hartree-Fock-Bogolyubov intrinsic states. Successive approximations are developed in order to derive simple expressions for transition form factors to be used in coupled-channel calculations. These form factors carry the information on the intrinsic structure of the nucleus since they depend explicitly on the intrinsic states ‖q〉 and ‖q’〉 as well as the overlap 〈q‖q’〉. Under the narrow overlap approximation 〈q‖q’〉∼δ(q-q’) this information gets partly lost, and the present formalism reduces to a more familiar form. An illustration is given in the context of phenomenological form factors for proton scattering from ¹⁹⁶Pt considered as a γ-unstable nucleus.