FEW-BODY CALCULATIONS OF PROTON-(6),HE-8 SCATTERING

We present a theoretical analysis of recently published experimental d ata for the elastic scattering of protons from the helium isotopes He- 6 and He-8 at energies near 700 MeV per nucleon. The analysis treats t he few-body degrees of freedom of these light neutron-rich nuclei expl icitly and is developed in terms of three-and five-body wave functions for He-6 and He-8, respectively. Comparisons of calculations with the data show that the sizes of the He nuclei consistent with such an ana lysis are larger by about 0.2 fm than those deduced from a more approx imate procedure in which the structure of the weakly bound nuclei ente rs only through an assumed nuclear matter density.