Non-observability of Spectroscopic Factors

The spectroscopic factor has long played a central role in nuclear reaction theory. However, it is not an observable. Consequently it is of minimal use as a meeting point between theory and experiment. In this paper the nature of the problem is explored. At the many-body level, unitary transformations are constructed that vary the spectroscopic factors over the full range of allowed values. At the phenomenological level, field redefinitions play a similar role and the spectroscopic factor extracted from experiment depend more on the assumed energy dependence of the potentials than on the measured cross-sections. The consistency conditions, gauge invariance and Wegmann's theorem play a large role in these considerations.