  Large-angle elastic scattering of alpha-particle and strongly-bound light
nuclei at a few tens MeV/nucleon has shown the pattern of rainbow scattering.
This interesting process was shown to involve a significant overlap of the two
colliding nuclei, with the total nuclear density well above the saturation
density of normal nuclear matter (NM). For a microscopic calculation of the
nucleus-nucleus potential within the folding model, we have developed a density
dependent nucleon-nucleon (NN) interaction based on the G-matrix interaction
M3Y. Our folding analysis of the refractive 4He, 12C, and 16O elastic
scattering shows consistently that the NM incompressibility K should be around
250 MeV which implies a rather soft nuclear Equation of State (EOS). To probe
the symmetry part of the nuclear EOS, we have used the isovector coupling to
link the isospin dependence of the proton optical potential to the cross
section of (p,n) charge-exchange reactions exciting the isobaric analog states
in nuclei of different mass regions. With the isospin dependence of the NN
interaction fine tuned to reproduce the charge exchange data, a realistic
estimate of the NM symmetry energy has been made.
