Heavy ion potentials: a critical review of various approaches

Semi-classical methods demonstrate explicity that the elastic amplitude for α-particle scattering can have significant contributions from waves which penetrate the target nucleus. In contrast, heavy-ion elastic scattering is mainly a surface phenomenon. Folding procedures give a good description of the shape and even the magnitude of the real part of the optical potential. These procedures do not include some exchange and polarization effects and microscopic calculations indicate that corrections from such effects can be large