New optical model systematics for heavy-ion collisions based on the São Paulo (version 2) and Brazilian nuclear potentials

Abstract The São Paulo potential version 2 and the Brazilian nuclear potential are bare nuclear interactions obtained via a systematic procedure that derives nuclear matter densities from Dirac–Hartree–Bogoliubov calculations. In the present work, we introduce two distinct systematics based on these potentials to describe the elastic scattering of heavy nuclei, derived from the analysis of more than 300 elastic angular distributions reported in the literature. Our results demonstrate that adopting the optical potentials on the forms $$V_{opt}^{SPP2}(R) = \left[ 1 + i \cdot 0.80(4) \right] \times V_{SPP2}(R)$$ V opt S P P 2 ( R ) = 1 + i · 0.80 ( 4 ) × V S P P 2 ( R ) and/or $$V_{opt}^{BNP}(R) = \left[ 1 + i \cdot 0.77(4) \right] \times V_{BNP}(R)$$ V opt BNP ( R ) = 1 + i · 0.77 ( 4 ) × V BNP ( R ) successfully describes the experimental data for several systems for which the elastic channel in not strongly coupled to non elastic channels. It is shown that these systematics do not depend on the nuclear mass of the systems. However, a correction that depends on the projectile’s bombarding energy is required to better describe the low-energy scattering data. A brief study is also conducted comparing the three systematics for nuclei with excess neutrons relative to their most abundant form, as well as for weakly bound nuclei. The systematics obtained with the SPP2 potential appear to be slightly better than those obtained with the Brazilian nuclear potential and the former version of the São Paulo potential.