This workshop will focus on theoretical descriptions of the nuclear
reactions that can be studied at present and future radioactive beam
facilities, from low to relativistic energies. These facilities allow
the study of reactions with exotic nuclei that have never been
accessible before, providing challenges for reaction theory as well
as important input for nuclear astrophysics.
An historical overview of the standard reaction formalisms, including
R-matrix, DWBA, Glauber, time-dependent approaches, transport and others,
will be an important component of the meeting. Keeping in mind the old
issues that arose from reactions with stable nuclei will help us
understand the challenges of applying existing approaches to
radioactive beams.
The descriptions that have commonly been used to analyze reactions
between stable nuclei are often unrealistic for reactions of weakly
bound, unstable nuclei. Some progress has been made in reformulating
reaction theories to incorporate the principal features of the
reaction mechanisms and apply them to a variety of new phenomena.
This work is typically in terms of simplified few-body models, so the
great open problem for the future remains: how to implement the full
many-body dynamics. A particular challenge is to perform reaction
calculations that exploit the full complexity of the ab-initio
structure models, an effort that has grown rapidly in recent years.
The workshop will cover several types of reactions that are of
interest for different reasons. For example, radiative capture,
breakup and transfer reactions can provide single-particle
spectroscopic information, while fusion reactions at low energy and
more violent central collisions at high energy can provide information
about nuclear properties crucial to understanding the conditions
inside neutron stars.