Angular structure of many-body correlations in atomic nuclei: From nuclear deformations to diffractive vector meson production in ${\hat{I}}^{3}A$ collisions

Abstract

There is growing evidence that high-energy scattering processes involving nuclei can offer unique insights into the many-body correlations present in nuclear ground states, in particular those of deformed nuclei. These processes involve, for instance, the collective anisotropic flows in heavy-ion collisions, or the diffractive production of vector mesons in photo-nuclear (${\hat{I}}^{3}A$) interactions. In this paper, we use a classical approximation and simple analytical models in order to exhibit characteristic and universal features of ground-state correlation functions that result from the presence of a deformed intrinsic state. In the case of a small axial quadrupole deformation, we show that the random rotation of the intrinsic density of the nucleus leads to a specific quadrupole modulation of the lab-frame two-body density as a function of the relative azimuthal angle. As a phenomenological, albeit academic application, we analyze the diffractive production of vector mesons in high-energy ${\hat{I}}^3{+}^8$Be collisions. This demonstrates with the simplest deformed nucleus how the two-body correlations impact the $|t|$ dependence of the incoherent cross sections.

19 pages, 16 figures