Evolving optical potentials to low resolution

Similarity Renormalization Group (SRG) operations evolve Hamiltonians by continuous unitary transformations, driving hard potentials to softer potentials by decoupling high- and low-momentum components. In practice the SRG will shift the high-momentum physics in the nuclear wavefunction, such as Short-Range Correlations (SRCs), to reaction operators when calculating nuclear observables such as cross sections. Using a toy model, we examine properties of the optical potential through SRG transformations and study the effects of commonly used approximation methods on the SRG-evolved potential. We also investigate the perturbativeness of such optical potentials by looking at the SRG evolution of the Weinberg eigenvalues of the interaction. Finally, we differentiate the non-locality that arises from SRG evolution from the non-local optical potential itself.