Airy's Pot of Gold: What Rainbows Are Teaching Us About Nuclear Scattering

摘要

The origin of atmospheric rainbows has been understood for over three centuries. Nuclei often behave like spherical drops of nuclear fluid, and two decades ago it was realized that the scattering of beams of alpha particles by nuclei could exhibit some aspects of rainbow scattering. This proved invaluable in understanding the interior part of the interaction potential between an alpha particle and a nucleus. More recently it was realized that analogous phenomena could be manifest in the scattering of two nuclei (specifically, light "heavy ions") such as ~(12)C and ~(16)O. Currently this is leading to considerable insight into the interaction between such nuclei, and recently has been used to place constraints on the value of the incompressibility of nuclear matter.