Advancing the Optical Potential Developments to Guide the Future Experimental Research

Recent years experienced an increasing interest for nuclear systems far from stability. The possibility of finding new and unexpected phenomena resulted in an increasing experimental effort devoted to investigating such systems. With the upcoming facilities for exotic nuclei, such as FAIR at GSI, SPIRAL2 at GANIL, and SPES at LNL, the nucleon-nucleus elastic scattering represents a natural way to explore the properties of these systems. In this context, the optical potential framework plays a central role and allows us to perform predictions to guide and analyse the future experimental research. Even if a phenomenological approach is usually preferred, the lack of predicting power due to the free parameters required in input, prevents us from providing reliable predictions. Thus, a microscopic approach to the optical potential represents the preferred way to make such predictions and assess the impact of unavoidable approximations, offering a clear physical interpretation of the reaction process. The goal of the project is to develop a microscopic optical potential starting from inter-nucleon interactions derived within the Chiral Perturbation Theory, which is the effective field theory of low-energy Quantum Chromo Dynamics. This framework offers the ideal starting point, allowing us to consistently derive two- and three-nucleon interactions that are connected by the same principles and symmetries. Such interactions are then used as the only input for the calculation of the optical potential, which is completely free from phenomenology and offers a higher predictive power.