The 16O(d, 3He)15N reaction at 29 MeV: Reaction mechanism and nuclear structure

Abstract

The reaction 16O(d, 3He)15N has been investigated using 29 MeV deuterons, and angular distributions were obtained for levels in 15N up to 10 MeV excitation energy. The measured distributions were subjected to distorted-wave (DWBA), compound nucleus (Hauser-Feshbach) and coupled-channel (CCBA) analyses. Only the strong transitions to the - ground state and the - state at 6324 keV exhibit distributions which are well described by DWBA. The spectroscopic factors are in agreement with shell-model estimates. The weak transitions generally show little structure and the spectroscopic factors extracted for these transitions tend to be unreasonably large. Contributions from compound nucleus formation were estimated and found to vary between about 10 % and 100 % of the observed cross sections with an average of the order of 30 %. The CCBA analysis for the transitions to the , + and + states at 5271, 7155 and 7566 keV, respectively, was performed using the spectroscopic amplitudes from weak coupling shell-model wave functions. Inelastic excitations to one-phonon states in the target and residual nuclei were included. The agreement between calculated and experimental distributions is good for both shape and magnitude, a conclusion which is not disturbed by the addition of small compound nucleus contributions. It is evident that spectroscopic factors extracted for the weak transitions on the basis of a direct one-step reaction mechanism alone are unreliable.