Photoabsorption in nuclei

Abstract

We calculate the total photoabsorption cross section and cross sections for inclusive pion and eta photoproduction in nuclei in the energy range from 300 MeV to 1 GeV within the framework of a semi-classical BUU transport model. Besides medium modifications like Fermi motion and Pauli blocking we focus on the collision broadening of the involved resonances. The resonance contributions to the elementary cross section are fixed by fits to partial wave amplitudes of pion photoproduction. The cross sections for $NR \to NN$, needed for the calculation of collision broadening, are obtained by detailed balance from a fit to $NN \to NN\pi$ cross sections. We show that a reasonable collision broadening is not able to explain the experimentally observed disappearance of the $D_{13}$(1520)-resonance in the photoabsorption cross section on nuclei.