  We investigate the role of high momentum components of optical model
potentials for nucleon-nucleus scattering and its incidence on their nonlocal
structure in coordinate space. The study covers closed-shell nuclei with mass
number in the range $4\leq A\leq 208$, for nucleon energies from tens of MeV up
to 1 GeV. To this purpose microscopic optical potentials are calculated using
density-dependent off-shell $g$ matrices in Brueckner-Hartree-Fock
approximation and based on Argonne $v_{18}$ as well as chiral 2$N$ force up to
next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order. We confirm that the gradual suppression
of high-momentum contributions of the optical potential results in quite
different coordinate-space counterparts, all of them accounting for the same
scattering observables. We infer a minimum cutoff momentum $Q$, function of the
target mass number and energy of the process, that filters out irrelevant
ultraviolet components of the potential. We find that when ultraviolet
suppression is applied to Perey-Buck nonlocal potential or local Woods-Saxon
potentials, they also result nonlocal with similar appearance to those obtained
from microscopic models in momentum space. We examine the transversal
nonlocality, quantity that makes comparable the intrinsic nonlocality of any
potential regardless of its representation. We conclude that meaningful
comparisons of nonlocal features of alternative potentials require the
suppression of their ultraviolet components.
