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 chemical bondq> and chemical bondq'> as well as the overlap . Under the narrow overlap approximation ∼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 /sup 196/Pt considered as a γ-unstable nucleus