Population of tetraneutron continuum in reactions of ${}^8$He on deuterium

Abstract

Search for the population of the low-energy continuum of a tetraneutron system was performed for reactions of the ${}^8$He beam on a deuterium target. These studies are based on the data [I.A. Muzalevskii \textit{et al.}, Phys.\ Rev.\ C \textbf{103}, 044313 (2021)], previously used for the studies of ${}^7$H and ${}^6$H in the ${}^2\text{H}{(}^8\text{He},{}^3\text{He}{)}^7$H and ${}^2\text{H}{(}^8\text{He},{}^4\text{He}{)}^6$H reactions. Evidence for a hump in the ${}^4$n continuum at $3.5\pm 0.7$ and $3.2\pm 0.8$ MeV was observed in the ${}^2$H(${}^8$He,${}^6$Li)${}^4$n and ${}^2$H(${}^8$He,${}^3$He)${}^7$H${\to }^3$H+${}^4$n reactions, respectively. The observed statistics is quite low (6 events and up to 40 events) corresponding to very low cross sections of few microbarns or tens of microbarns. The background conditions for the ${}^2$H(${}^8$He,${}^6$Li)${}^4$n reaction are shown to be good, favoring the physical nature of the observed events. The ${}^2$H(${}^8$He,${}^3$He)${}^7$H${\to }^3$H+${}^4$n process transforms to the ${}^2$H(${}^8$He,${}^6$Li${}^{\ast }{)}^{4}n$ reaction in the limit of the highest ${}^7$H decay energies. The population of the low-energy region in the ${}^4$n spectrum is found to be perfectly correlated with the population of the lowest ${}^6$Li state in the ${}^3$He+${}^3$H continuum with $E^{\ast }=18$ MeV. Theoretical calculations of ${}^8$He in a five-body $\hat{I}\pm$+$4n$ and of ${}^4$n in a four-body hyperspherical models are presented. The ${}^8$He wave function is shown to contain strong specific correlations, which may give rise to very low-energy structures in tetraneutron continuum in extreme-peripheral reaction scenarios.

14 pages, 9 figures