Elastic and Inelastic Scattering at 168 MeV in theO16—C12System

Differential cross sections for the elastic scattering and the inelastic scattering to the most strongly excited states in the ${\mathrm{O}}^{16}$—${\mathrm{C}}^{12}$ system have been measured using the 168-MeV ${\mathrm{O}}^{16}$ beam from the Yale University heavy-ion linear accelerator. The states most strongly excited are the $2^{+}$ state in ${\mathrm{C}}^{12}$ at 4.43 MeV and the $3^{-}$ state in ${\mathrm{O}}^{16}$ at 6.14 MeV. The mutual excitation reaction wherein both these levels are excited ($Q=-10.57\mathrm{}$ MeV) was also observed and measured. All of the angular distributions measured have an oscillatory behavior, a consequence of the strong absorption of the incident wave in the nuclear interior and indicative of a direct interaction mechanism. A distorted-wave Born approximation analysis of the data is obtained in order to extract reliable nuclear parameters. The results of this experiment are compared to previous elastic and inelastic scattering, from ${\mathrm{C}}^{12}$ in the adiabatic-Fraunhofer limit. Fair agreement in shown in spite of the variety of projectiles used in the comparison. The transition strengths for inelastic scattering are further compared to the electromagnetic transition probabilities and a scheme for relating the two quantities is presented.