Searching for a polarization potential in the breakup of 8B

Continuum couplings are extremely important to describe the breakup of loosely bound nuclei. We explore the various methods of extracting a polarization potential, as an effective representation of these couplings in the breakup channel. Our application consists of B-8 -> Be-7 + p on Ni-58 at near-barrier energies. We find that the standard ways of determining polarization potentials are not useful to describe the breakup cross section in terms of a one-step process. Our results indicate that continuum couplings are strongly non-local and the complexity of coupled channel methods may well be unavoidable.