Evaluation of an eikonal model for 11Li-nucleus elastic scattering

An eikonal model is presented and evaluated for the elastic scattering of 11Li from target nuclei. The 11Li is treated as a 9Li+n+n three-body system interacting with the target through two-body 9Li- and neutron-target interactions. A careful quantitative investigation of the sensitivity of the calculated elastic-scattering cross section to the required theoretical inputs, the neutron and 9Li-target potentials and the assumed structure of the 11Li, is presented. Since the structure of the 11Li halo is not yet known, we investigate the extent to which elastic-scattering data are able to discriminate between different theoretical 11Li wave-function models. We find that there is some sensitivity in the calculated elastic cross-section angular distributions to the degree of neutron correlations in the 11Li wave function and that these are more significant at lower incident energies and on lighter targets. We conclude that the current uncertainty in the 9Li-target interaction is the major obstacle to elucidating the structure of 11Li from present elastic-scattering data. ((orig.))