EXAMINATION OF INCONSISTENCIES BETWEEN THE DEFORMED POTENTIAL MODEL AND FOLDING MODELS FOR ANALYSIS OF INELASTIC HADRON SCATTERING

It is customary to extract deformation lengths from inelastic scatteri ng data by using a deformed optical potential. It is then assumed that this deformation length also characterizes the deformation of the und erlying density distribution of the excited nucleus. This equivalence is exact for a dipole deformation, but this corresponds simply to a sp urious excitation mode, namely a shift of the center of mass of the sy stem. We show that, even when the potential is obtained by folding an effective interaction over the density distribution, the deformed pote ntial model is not exact for other multipoles, except in the limit tha t the interaction has a zero range. The errors made when the interacti on has a realistic finite range can be large.