Closed-form description of polarization in light and heavy ion scattering: Elastic scattering

We present a closed-form description of the vector and tensor polarization in the elastic scattering of strongly absorbed particles of general spin s by spin-zero nuclei. This description generalizes the closed formalism developed previously for the elastic scattering of spinless particles by including spin-orbit interaction in the partial-wave scattering matrix. The resulting expressions are used to analyze the recent data of the Birmingham group on the elastic scattering of polarized 3He by medium-mass nuclei (26Mg, 27Al, 58Ni), and those of the Heidelberg group for polarized 6Li ions scattered by 28Si and 58Ni. Our results confirm earlier predictions that the polarization in collisions of strongly absorbed particles is dominated by diffractive processes. We are able to draw some general conclusions on the l-space structure of the spin-orbit interaction,and find that this has an appreciable imaginary part. A comparison of 3He and 6Li scattering indicates that the spin-orbit coupling is of similar strength for light and heavy ions