Improving proton-induced one-nucleon removal in intranuclear cascade

It is a well-established fact that intranuclear-cascade models generally fail to consistently reproduce the cross sections for one-proton and one-neutron removal from stable nuclei by a high-energy proton beam. We use simple shell-model calculations to investigate the reasons of this deficiency. We find that a refined description of the neutron skin and of the energy density in the nuclear surface is crucial for the aforementioned observables, and that neither ingredient is sufficient if taken separately. As a by-product, the predictions for removal of several nucleons are also improved by the refined treatment.