Correlations probed in direct two-nucleon removal reactions

Abstract

Final-state-exclusive momentum distributions of fast, forward travelling residual nuclei, following two nucleon removal from fast secondary radioactive beams of projectile nuclei, can and have now been measured. Assuming that the most important reaction mechanism is the sudden direct removal of a pair of nucleons from a set of relatively simple, active shell-model orbital configurations, such distributions were predicted to depend strongly on the total angular momentum I carried by the two nucleons - the final state spin for spin 0+ projectiles. The sensitivity of these now-accessible observables to specific details of the (correlated) two-nucleon wave functions is of importance. We clarify that it is the total orbital angular momentum L of the two nucleons that is the primary factor in determining the shapes and widths of the calculated momentum distributions. It follows that, with accurate measurements, this dependence upon the L make-up of the two-nucleon wave functions could be used to assess the accuracy of (shell- or many-body) model predictions of these two-nucleon configurations. By use of several tailored examples, with specific combinations of active two-nucleon orbitals, we demonstrate that more subtle structure aspects may be observed, allowing such reactions to probe and/or confirm the details of theoretical model wave functions.

14 pages, 9 figures, Physical Review C in press

References in corpus (5)

• Cross-shell excitation in two-proton knockout: Structure of ${}^{52}$Ca
• Momentum distributions in stripping reactions of radioactive projectiles at intermediate energies
• Pauli blocking and medium effects in nucleon knockout reactions
• Two-neutron knockout from neutron-deficient ${}^{34}$Ar, ${}^{30}$S, and ${}^{26}$Si
• Non-adiabatic corrections to elastic scattering of halo nuclei

Cited by in corpus (8)

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• One- and two-neutron removal reactions from the most neutron-rich carbon isotopes
• Two-nucleon correlation effects in knockout reactions from 12C
• Two-neutron knockout as a probe of the composition of states in ${}^{22}$Mg, ${}^{23}$Al, and ${}^{24}$Si
• Eikonal reaction theory for two-neutron removal reactions
• Probing proton cross-shell excitations through the two-neutron removal from 38Ca
• Correlations in intermediate-energy two-proton removal reactions
• Microscopic two-nucleon overlaps and knockout reactions from ${}^{12}$C