Three-cluster breakup in deuteron-deuteron collisions: single-scattering approximation

Abstract: We present results for the three-cluster breakup in deuteron-deuteron collisions at 130 and 270 MeV deuteron beam energy. The breakup amplitude is calculated using the first term in the Neumann series expansion of the corresponding exact four-nucleon equations. In analogy with nucleon-deuteron breakup where an equivalent approximation is compared with exact calculations, we expect this single-scattering approximation to provide a rough estimation of three-body breakup observables in quasifree configurations. We predict the nucleon-deuteron and deuteron-deuteron three-cluster breakup cross sections to be of a comparable size and thereby question the reliability of the recent experimental data [A. Ramazani-Moghaddam-Arani, Ph.D. thesis, University of Groningen, 2009; A. Ramazani-Moghaddam-Arani et al., EPJ Web of Conferences 3, 04012 (2010)] that is smaller by about three orders of magnitude. We also show that an equivalent single-scattering approximation provides a reasonable description of deuteron-deuteron elastic scattering at forward scattering angles.