Inclusive breakup of three-fragment weakly bound nuclei

The inclusive breakup of three-fragment projectiles is discussed within a four-body spectator model. Both the elastic breakup and the non-elastic breakup are obtained in a unified framework. Originally developed in the 80s for two-fragment projectiles such as the deuteron, in this paper the theory is successfully generalized to three-fragment projectiles. The expression obtained for the inclusive cross section allows the extraction of the incomplete fusion cross section, and accordingly generalizes the surrogate method to cases such as (t,p) and (t,n) reactions. It is found that two-fragment correlations inside the projectile affect in a conspicuous way the elastic breakup cross section. The inclusive non-elastic breakup cross section is calculated and is found to contain the contribution of a three-body absorption term that is also strongly influenced by the two-fragment correlations. This latter cross section contains the so-called incomplete fusion where more than one compound nuclei are formed. Our theory describes both stable weakly bound three-fragment projectiles and unstable ones such as the Borromean nuclei.