Shrinking ℎ as a recipe for revealing classical-like properties of optical-potential cross-sections

A simple recipe for revealing classical-like properties of optical-potential cross-sections is proposed. The recipe is based on the fact that the classical properties are not expected to depend on the actual value of ℎ. This allows us to identify the classical-like characteristics of an optical-potential cross-section by simply repeating the calculation with different values of ℎ, and observing which properties of the cross-section are invariant. The method is applied to the cross-sections of a few optical potentials used to describe the recent data of light heavy-ion elastic scattering. An improved near-side/far-side decomposition is used to separate the near-side and far-side components of the optical-potential cross-sections. (orig.)