Effects of relativistic kinematics in heavy ion elastic scattering

Relativistic corrections to the reaction kinematic parameters were made for elastic scattering of ⁶Li, ¹²C and ⁴⁰Ar from ⁴⁰Ca, ⁹⁰Zr and ²⁰⁸Pb targets at incident energies between 20 and 100 MeV/nucleon. The results of optical model calculations show that the effects of such corrections are important when describing the angular distributions of elastic scattering cross sections for heavy ion scattering at incident energies as low as around 40 MeV/nucleon. The effects on the total reaction cross sections on the other hand, were found to be small within the energy range studied when the optical model potential is fixed.