Application of a microscopic optical potential of chiral effective field theory in (p, d) transfer reactions

The microscopic global nucleon–nucleus optical model potential (OMP) proposed by Whitehead, Lim, and Holt, the WLH potential (Whitehead et al., Phys Rev Lett 127:182502, 2021), which was constructed in the framework of many-body perturbation theory with state-of-the-art nuclear interactions from chiral effective field theory (EFT), was tested with (p, d) transfer reactions calculated using adiabatic wave approximation. The target nuclei included both stable and unstable nuclei, and the incident energies reached 200 MeV. The results were compared with experimental data and predictions using the phenomenological global optical potential of Koning and Delaroche, the KD02 potential. Overall, we found that the microscopic WLH potential described the (p, d) reaction angular distributions similarly to the phenomenological KD02 potential; however, the former was slightly better than the latter for radioactive targets. On average, the obtained spectroscopic factors (SFs) using both microscopic and phenomenological potentials were similar when the incident energies were below approximately 120 MeV. However, their difference tended to increase at higher incident energies, which was particularly apparent for the doubly magic target nucleus \(^{40}\) ${}^{40}$ Ca.