Dissecting reaction calculations using halo effective field theory and ab initio input

We present a description of the breakup of halo nuclei in peripheral nuclear reactions by coupling a model of the projectile motivated by halo effective field theory with a fully dynamical treatment of the reaction using the dynamical eikonal approximation. Our description of the halo system reproduces its long-range properties, i.e., binding energy and asymptotic normalization coefficients of bound states and phase shifts of continuum states. As an application we consider the breakup of Be-11 in collisions on Pb and C targets. Taking the input for our halo-EFT-inspired description of Be-11 from a recent ab initio calculation of that system yields a good description of the Coulomb-dominated breakup on Pb at energies up to about 2 MeV, with the result essentially independent of the short-distance part of the halo wave function. However, the nuclear dominated breakup on C is more sensitive to short-range physics. The role of spectroscopic factors and possible extensions of our approach to include additional short-range mechanisms are also discussed.