Microscopic Optical Potentials: recent achievements and future perspectives

Few years ago we started the investigation of microscopic Optical Potentials (OP) in the framework of chiral effective field theories [1, 2] and published our results in a series of manuscripts. Starting from the very first work [3], where a microscopic OP was introduced following the multiple scattering procedure of Watson [4], and then followed by Refs. [5, 6], where the agreement with experimental data and phenomenological approaches was successfully tested, we finally arrived at a description of elastic scattering processes off non-zero spin nuclei [7]. Among our achievements, it is worth mentioning the partial inclusion of three-nucleon forces [8], and the extension of our OP to antiproton-nucleus elastic scattering [9]. Despite the overall good agreement with empirical data obtained so far, we do believe that several improvements and upgrades of the present approach are still to be achieved. In this short essay we would like to address some of the most relevant achievements and discuss an interesting development that, in our opinion, is needed to further improve microscopic OPs in order to reach in a near future the same level of accuracy of the phenomenological ones.