Challenging nuclear structure models through a microscopic description of proton inelastic scattering off ²⁰⁸Pb

Differential cross sections from fully microscopic calculations of inelastic proton scattering off ²⁰⁸Pb are compared to experimental scattering data for incident proton energies between 65 and 201 MeV. The required nucleon-nucleus interactions were formed by folding nuclear structure information with a reliable nucleon-nucleon effective interaction that has no adjustable parameter. The absence of phenomenological normalisation in our approach offers the possibility to interpret with confidence the calculated results in terms of the quality of the underlying nuclear structure description: a feature that had been reserved, until recently, to the electron probe. We have used this method to investigate the effect of long range correlations embedded in excited states on calculated inelastic observables and demonstrate the sensitivity of nucleon scattering predictions to details of the nuclear structure.