Remark on: the neutron spherical optical-model absorption

The energy-dependent behavior of the absorption term of the spherical neutron optical potential for doubly magic 208Pb and the neighboring 209Bi is examined. These considerations suggest a phenomenological model that results in an intuitively attractive energy dependence of the imaginary potential that provides a good description of the observed neutron cross sections and that is qualitatively consistent with theoretical concepts. At the same time it provides an alternative to some of the arbitrary assumptions involved in many conventional optical-model interpretations reported in the literature and reduces the number of the parameters of the model