Full-folding optical potentials in elastic proton-nucleus scattering

The optical potential for elastic scattering of protons from ${}_{}{}^{16}{}_{}{}^{}\mathrm{O}$ at incident beam energies between 100 and 500 MeV is calculated from a full-folding integral of a simple s-p-shell representation of the target density matrix together with fully off-shell nucleon-nucleon t matrices derived from two different Bonn meson exchange models. Elastic scattering observables calculated from this full-folding optical potential are compared to those obtained from ‘‘optimum factorized’’ as well as on-shell local (‘‘tρ’’) approximations. The optimum factorization is found to provide a good approximation to elastic scattering observables obtained from the full-folding optical potential, although the potentials differ in the structure of their nonlocality. A perturbative treatment of the nonlocality is used to extract approximate localized potentials and associated Perey damping factors for the interior wave functions. The results indicate that the interior wave function from the optimum factorization potential and the full-folding potential are very similar.