Special Relativity and Reactions with Unstable Nuclei

Abstract

Dynamical relativistic effects are often neglected in the description of reactions with unstable nuclear beams at intermediate energies (E ~ 100 MeV/nucleon). Evidently, this introduces sizable errors in experimental analysis and theoretical descriptions of these reactions. This is particularly important for the experiments held in GANIL/France, MSU/USA, RIKEN/Japan and GSI/Germany. I review a few examples where relativistic effects have been studied in nucleus-nucleus scattering at intermediate energies.

Comments: 8 pages, 2 figures, proceedings of Workshop on "Reaction Mechanisms for Rare Isotope Beams" Michigan State University March 9-12,2005