Inelastic excitation and the nucleon optical potential

We study nucleon elastic scattering from targets of 40Ca and 208Pb in the presence of inelastic excitation to a fairly realistic set of levels. We suggest a method of averaging over the l-dependence of the trivially equivalent local potentials so as to obtain smooth, surface-peaked potentials which yield cross sections in good agreement with exact results in the forward hemisphere. Only slightly poorer agreement is obtained with potentials from simple, analytical formulae derived from the plane wave approximation. We also briefly compare approximate and exact inelastic cross sections. 16 refs. (Author)