LAUSR

Background: The nuclear optical potential is a successful tool for the study of nucleon-nucleus elastic scattering and its use has been further extended to inelastic scattering and other nuclear reactions. The nuclear density of the target nucleus is a fundamental ingredient in the construction of the optical potential and thus plays an important role in the description of the scattering process.Purpose: In this paper we derive a microscopic optical potential for intermediate energies using ab initio translationally invariant nonlocal one-body nuclear densities computed within the no-core shell model (NCSM) approach utilizing two- and three-nucleon chiral interactions as the only input.Methods: The optical potential is derived at first order within the spectator expansion of the nonrelativistic multiple scattering theory by adopting the impulse approximation. Nonlocal nuclear densities are derived from the NCSM one-body densities calculated in the second quantization. The translational invariance is generated by exactly removing the spurious center-of-mass (COM) component from the NCSM eigenstates.Results: The ground-state local and nonlocal densities of $^{4,6,8}\mathrm{He}$, $^{12}\mathrm{C}$, and $^{16}\mathrm{O}$ are calculated and applied to optical potential construction. The differential cross sections and the analyzing powers for the elastic proton scattering off these nuclei are then calculated for different values of the incident proton energy. The impact of nonlocality and the COM removal is discussed.Conclusions: The use of nonlocal densities has a substantial impact on the differential cross sections and improves agreement with experiment in comparison to results generated with the local densities especially for light nuclei. For the halo nuclei $^{6}\mathrm{He}$ and $^{8}\mathrm{He}$, the results for the differential cross section are in a reasonable agreement with the data although a more sophisticated model for the optical potential is required to properly describe the analyzing powers.