First experimental test of the ratio method for nuclear-reaction analysis

Abstract

Nuclear halos are very exotic quantal structures observed far from stability. Because of their short lifetime, they are mostly studied through reactions. The ratio method offers a new observable: the ratio of angular differential cross sections for breakup and scattering. It is predicted to be much more sensitive to the projectile structure than individual cross sections thanks to its independence of the reaction process. We test this new observable experimentally for the first time considering the collision of 11Be on C at 22.8 MeV/nucleon. We extend this analysis to similar data recently measured on Pb at 19.1 MeV/nucleon. Both analyses confirm the theoretical predictions, which opens the door to a new era in the study of nuclear structure near the neutron dripline. This should prove invaluable in conjunction with the start of FRIB. The ratio method could also be extended to other fields of quantum physics beyond nuclear reactions.

References in corpus (22)

• Coulomb and nuclear breakup of a halo nucleus 11Be
• Effective Field Theory for Halo Nuclei: Shallow p-Wave States
• Effective field theory description of halo nuclei
• Can Ab Initio Theory Explain the Phenomenon of Parity Inversion in ${}^{11}$Be?
• Halo nucleus Be-11: A spectroscopic study via neutron transfer
• Interplay between valence and core excitation mechanisms in the breakup of halo nuclei
• Reactions of a Be-10 beam on proton and deuteron targets
• Reliable extraction of the $dB(E1)/dE$ for ${}^{11}$Be from its breakup at 520 MeV/nucleon
• Dissecting reaction calculations using Halo EFT and ab initio input
• Systematic analysis of the peripherality of the ${}^{10}$Be$(d,p)$${}^{11}$Be transfer reaction and extraction of the asymptotic normalization coefficient of ${}^{11}$Be bound states
• Analysis of a low-energy correction to the eikonal approximation
• Double-folding potentials from chiral effective field theory
• One-neutron halo structure by the ratio method
• Halo effective field theory analysis of one-neutron knockout reactions of ${}^{11}\mathrm{Be}$ and ${}^{15}\mathrm{C}$
• Influence of the halo upon angular distributions for elastic scattering and breakup
• The ratio method: a new tool to study one-neutron halo nuclei
• Dispersion relations applied to double-folding potentials from chiral EFT
• Quantifying uncertainties due to optical potentials in one-neutron knockout reactions
• The complete quantification of parametric uncertainties in (d,p) transfer reactions
• Simulating core excitation in breakup reactions of halo nuclei using an effective three-body force
• Extension of the ratio method to low energy
• Extension of the ratio method to proton-rich nuclei