Quadrupole Elastic Scattering of Alpha Particles by Polarized Nuclei

The effect of the charge distribution of target nuclei on elastic scattering between nuclei at an incident energy well below the Coulomb barrier has been investigated in terms of the deviation from Rutherford scattering. In the present paper, we report the result of the calculation for the case in which the target nuclei are oriented during the collision. For the head-on collision of alpha particles with ${\mathrm{U}}^{238}$ and ${\mathrm{Ta}}^{181}$ at 24 and 16 MeV, we find that the deviations from Rutherford scattering should be about 18 and 20%, respectively, if the polarization of the target is complete. Therefore, we conclude that the deviation should be large enough for detection even for a reasonable degree of polarization of the target.