Ab Initio Calculations of Low-Energy Nuclear Scattering Using Confining Potential Traps

A recently modified method to enable low-energy nuclear scattering results to be extracted from the discrete energy levels of the target-projectile clusters confined by harmonic potential traps is tested. We report encouraging results for neutron-α and neutron-^{24}O elastic scattering from analyzing the trapped levels computed using two different ab initio nuclear structure methods. The n-α results have also been checked against a direct ab initio reaction calculation. The n-^{24}O results demonstrate the approach's applicability for a large range of systems provided their spectra in traps can be computed by ab initio methods. A key ingredient is a rigorous understanding of the errors in the calculated energy levels caused by inevitable Hilbert-space truncations in the ab initio methods.