Sensitivity of one-neutron knockout to the nuclear structure of halo nuclei

Abstract

Background: Information about the structure of halo nuclei are often inferred from one-neutron knockout reactions. Typically the parallel-momentum distribution of the remaining core is measured after a high-energy collision of the exotic projectile with a light target. Purpose: We study how the structure of halo nuclei affects knockout observables considering an eikonal model of reaction. Method: To evaluate the sensitivity of both the diffractive and stripping parallel-momentum distributions to the structure of halo nuclei, we consider several descriptions of the projectile within a halo effective field theory. We consider the case of 11Be, the archetypical one-neutron halo nucleus, impinging on 12C at 68 MeV/nucleon, which are usual experimental conditions for such measurements. The low-energy constants of the description of 11Be are fitted to experimental data as well as to predictions of an ab initio nuclear-structure model. Results: One-neutron knockout reaction is confirmed to be purely peripheral, the parallel-momentum distribution of the remaining core is only sensitive to the asymptotics of the ground-state wavefunction and not to its norm. The presence of an excited state in the projectile spectrum reduces the amplitude of the breakup cross section; the corresponding probability flux is transferred to the inelastic-scattering channel. Although the presence of a resonance in the core-neutron continuum significantly affects the energy distribution, it has no impact on the parallel-momentum distribution. Conclusions: One-neutron knockout cross section can be used to infer information about the tail of the ground-state wavefunction, viz. its asymptotic normalization coefficient (ANC). The independence of the parallel-momentum distribution on the continuum description makes the extraction of the ANC from this observable very reliable.

10 pages, 4 figures, 4 tables. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. C. Compared to the first version, two tests in Sec. IIIC are removed and an appendix is added

References in corpus (9)

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• Coulomb corrected eikonal description of the breakup of halo nuclei
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• Peripherality of breakup reactions
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Cited by in corpus (7)

• Halo effective field theory analysis of one-neutron knockout reactions of ${}^{11}\mathrm{Be}$ and ${}^{15}\mathrm{C}$
• Sensitivity of quasi-free reactions on details of the bound-state overlap functions
• Quantifying uncertainties due to optical potentials in one-neutron knockout reactions
• Unified mechanism behind the even-parity ground state and neutron halo of ${}^{11}$Be
• Combining Halo-EFT descriptions of nuclei and precise models of nuclear reactions
• Perspectives on few-body cluster structures in exotic nuclei
• Detailed Study of the Eikonal Reaction Theory for the breakup of one-neutron halo nuclei