Interpretation of Airy minima in 16O + 16O and 16O + 12C elastic scattering in terms of a barrier-wave/internal-wave decomposition

The observation of refractive effects in 16O + 16O and 16O + 12C elastic scattering data has definitively established the fact that the optical potential for some light heavy-ion systems is relatively transparent and that its real part is deep. Most of the interpretations of the rainbow features of these data rely on the so-called nearside-farside decomposition of the scattering amplitude. Starting from recent optical model analyses of 16O + 16O and 16O + 12C elastic scattering around 100 MeV incident energy as an example, we present an alternative interpretation based on the barrier-wave/internal-wave decomposition first proposed by Brink and Takigawa. This method, which complements the nearside-farside approach, demonstrates clearly the exceptional transparency of the 16O + 16O, and to a lesser extent 16O + 12C, interactions at the investigated energies and makes possible the extraction of the two contributions whose interference explains the Airy oscillations seen in the farside amplitude. © 2002 MAIK "Nauka/Interperiodica".SCOPUS: ar.j