Complete breakup of light nuclei induced by elementary particles

The review presents systematically the existing theoretical and experimental results on complete breakup of light nuclei induced by elementary particles. A restriction is made to the recent theoretical studies that advance the unified approach to investigation of the structure of light nuclei and nuclear reactions on light nuclei. Analysis of the example of three-particle scattering illustrates the difficulties of the modern theory of many-particle reactions associated with the complicated asymptotic behavior of the wave function in the coordinate representation of the singularities of the scattering amplitude in the momentum representation. Various methods in the theory of the complete breakup of light nuclei induced by elementary particles are discussed. Experimental data on some reactions of this kind are given and compared with theoretical results. The following reactions are considered: complete photodisintegration of three- and four-particle nuclei; three-particle photodisintegration of the 6Li nucleus in the cluster model; three-α-particle photodisintegration of the 12C nucleus; complete breakup of light nuclei by π+- mesons; and breakup with the participation of muons and hyperons