A crystallographic method to investigate the presence of cluster configurations in 12C

This work presents a crystallographic approach for the investigation of the existence of cluster structures in the ground state of 12C, with some forecasts on its extension to other nuclei, such as 16O. The model is based on outstanding analogies between the world of molecules and that of atomic nuclei: diffractive studies are indeed used to determine molecular structures and properties, and a similar approach was developed in the present work for atomic nuclei, under the assumption of the presence of regular alpha-cluster structures. In this work we analyzed a large database of literature data for the elastic scattering angular distributions of protons colliding on 12C and 4He target nuclei in the bombarding energy range Ep = 30-80 MeV, for which the de Broglie wavelength associated with the proton beam is comparable with the distance existing between the assumed alpha-clusters inside the nucleus.