Nonperturbative time-dependent approach to breakup of halo nuclei

The time-dependent mesh method is proposed as an efficient tool for a quantitative analysis of the Coulomb breakup of halo nuclei. The approach allows a treatment of breakup reactions in the nonperturbative regime. It avoids any multipole expansion for the Coulomb interaction between the projectile and the target. Moreover, it permits using more general trajectories allowing an estimation of postacceleration effects. This numerical technique is applied to the ¹¹Be+²⁰⁸→Pb¹⁰Be+n+²⁰⁸Pb breakup reaction at 72 MeV per nucleon and is compared with experiment and with a previous calculation. Corrections due to the projectile deflection from a straight-line trajectory and to the neutron spin rotation are found to be weak for the specific collision parameters.