JOURNAL OF PHYSICS G-NUCLEAR AND PARTICLE PHYSICS, cilt.31, sa.10, 2005 (SCI-Expanded)
We present the failure of the standard coupled-channels method in explaining inelastic scattering together with other observables such as elastic scattering, excitation function and fusion data. We use both microscopic double-folding and phenomenological deep potentials with shallow imaginary components. We argue that the solution of the problems for the inelastic scattering data is not related to the central nuclear potential, but to the coupling potential between excited states. We demonstrate that these problems can be addressed in a systematic way by using a different shape for the coupling potential instead of the usual one based on Taylor expansion.