Coulomb-nuclear coupling and interference effects in the breakup of halo nuclei

Nuclear and Coulomb breakup of halo nuclei have been treated often as incoherent processes and structure information have been extracted from their study. The aim of this paper is to clarify whether interference effects and Coulomb-nuclear couplings are important and how they could modify the simple picture previously used. We calculate the neutron angular and energy distributions by using first order perturbation theory for the Coulomb amplitude and an eikonal approach for the nuclear breakup. This allows for a simple physical interpretation of the results which are mostly analytical. Our formalism includes the effect of the nuclear distortion of the neutron wave function on the Coulomb amplitude. This leads to a Coulomb-nuclear coupling term derived here for the first time which gives a small contribution for light targets but is of the same order of magnitude as nuclear breakup for heavy targets. The overall interference is constructive for light to medium targets and destructive for heavy targets. Thus it appears that Coulomb breakup experiments need to be analyzed with more accurate models than those used so far. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.