The nuclear optical model was developed in the 1950s and 60s in part to explain neutron total cross section data in a simple, intuitive way. Since then, regional and global optical models have been developed for a wide variety of projectiles (p, n, alpha, heavy ion, etc.), but most lack sufficient justification in formal many‐body methods. In addition, as phenomenological objects, optical models are only as good as the data they are based on. Thus, given the paucity of high‐energy proton reaction cross section and neutron total cross section data in the literature, their usefulness typically diminishes beyond 100 MeV.
This seminar will present a new digitizer‐enabled approach employed to make a series of neutron total cross section measurements on isotopically‐separated targets across a wide energy range. Coupled with new developments in the Dispersive Optical Model (DOM), which extends traditional optical models to the negative en‐ ergy domain by enforcing a dispersion relation, these new experimental results generate predictions for the neutron skins of O18, Ca48, Ni58, Ni64, Sn112, and Sn124 and help constrain the density dependence of the symmetry energy.