It is often stated that heavy-ion nucleon knockout reactions are mostly sensitive to the tails of the bound-state wave functions. In contrast, $(p,2p)$ and $(p,pn)$ reactions are known to access information on the full overlap functions within the nucleus. We analyze the oxygen isotopic chain and explore the differences between single-particle wave functions generated with potential models, used in the experimental analysis of knockout reactions, and ab initio computations from self-consistent Green's function theory. Contrary to common belief, we find that not only the tail of the overlap functions, but also their internal part is assessed in both reaction mechanisms, which are crucial to yield accurately determined spectroscopic information.

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• Direct reactions
• Nucleon induced nuclear reactions
• Transfer reactions
• Unstable nuclei induced nuclear reactions
• Nuclear many-body theory