Halo-EFT: an effective and efficient tool to study reactions with halo nuclei

Abstract

Halo nuclei are exotic nuclei, which exhibit a much larger matter radius than their isobars. This unusual size is now understood as a threshold effect, in which one or two valence nucleons are loosely bound to the core of the nucleus. Thanks to this loose binding, halo nuclei exhibit a strongly clusterised structure with a diffuse neutron halo surrounding a compact core. Being short lived, halo nuclei are mostly studied through reactions, such as breakup. In this talk we show that including Halo Effective Field Theory within existing reaction codes is both effective and efficient to analyse experimental data. We first apply this idea to study the Coulomb breakup of 19C within a Bayesian approach. Second, we extend Halo-EFT to include the core's excitation to test the sensitivity of the Coulomb breakup of 11Be on spectroscopic factors.

8 pages, 4 figures, contribution to the proceedings of Cluster'26, the 12th International Conference on Clustering Aspects of Nuclear Structure and Dynamics (London 8-12 June 2026)