Experimental study of the variation of alpha elastic scattering cross sections along isotopic and isotonic chains at low energies.

To improve the reliability of statistical model calculations in the region of heavy proton rich isotopes alpha elastic scattering experiments have been performed at ATOMKI, Debrecen, Hungary. The experiments were carried out at several energies above and below the Coulomb barrier with high precision. The measured angular distributions can be used for testing the predictions of the global and regional optical potential parameter sets. Moreover, we derived the variation of the elastic alpha scattering cross section along the Z = 50 (¹¹²Sn–¹²⁴Sn) isotopic and N = 50 (⁸⁹Y–⁹²Mo) isotonic chains. In this paper we summarize the efforts to provide high precision experimental angular distributions for several A≈100 nuclei to test the global optical potential parameterizations applied to p-process network calculations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]