Nucleon exchange effects in ¹⁶O-¹⁶O elastic scattering

A natural boundary condition method which was developed recently for the microscopic description of composite particle scattering is used to treat ¹⁶O-¹⁶O elastic scattering. The results of a calculation employing a fully antisymmetric wave function are compared with other microscopic calculations. The effects on the phase shifts of consistently approximating the wave function to allow only up to 1, 2, etc. particle exchange between the clusters, are studied in detail. It is found that in general all the exchange terms contribute significantly although the nature of these exchange effects is dependent upon the choice of the effective nucleon-nucleon interaction.