Proton reaction cross sections as measures of the spatial distibutions of neutrons in exotic nuclei

Proton and neutron densities from Skyrme-Hartree-Fock calculations of a number of nuclei with masses ranging from 28 to 58 have been used to generate optical potentials for proton elastic scattering. Those potentials, generated by folding the structure functions with effective in-medium nucleon-nucleon (NN) interactions, have been used to evaluate proton total reaction cross sections; cross sections that reveal signatures of the structures.