\baselineskip =0.95\baselineskip The elastic scattering of strongly bound nuclei at energies of 7--70 MeV/u shows the phenomenon of Rainbow Scattering. These scattering processes are due to strongly attractive potentials leading to deflections to negative angles and involve a strong overlap of nuclear densities. The elastic scattering of ¹⁶O+¹⁶O has been studied in several laboratories over a wide range of energies with high precision to very low cross sections at large angles. At high energy the systematics of the primary Airy maxima has been established and at lower energies higher order Airy-structures are identified. The angular distributions at all energies are consistently described with{ITALIC deep} potentials, as obtained from the double-folding model with a weakly density dependent effective nucleon--nucleon interaction, which gives in Hartree-Fock calculations a soft (K= 230 MeV) equation of state for cold nuclear matter. It is shown that the Pauli-blocking expected for the larger density overlaps at small energies is strongly reduced due to the large relative momenta of the two centres in a self-consistent treatment of the mean field effects, the Fermi-spheres of the two nuclei in the overlap region are strongly repelled in momentum space, due to the increase of the relative momenta of nucleons. The systematics of the data also confirms the refractive origin of structures in one-neutron transfer reactions, as well as the pronounced structure in the excitation functions in ¹⁶O+¹⁶O scattering observed at lower energies.

PACS numbers: 21.30.Fe, 25.70.Bc, 24.10.Ht