The heavy-ion spin-orbit interaction

An expression for the induced spin-orbit potential in a heavy-ion collision is derived by making an adiabatic approximation to the effective interaction in second-order perturbation theory. an explicit form for the induced spin-orbit interaction for the case of a projectile of arbitrary ground state spin S is given and is shown to be equivalent to the result obtained using the methods of geometrical magnetism. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V.