Revealing the short-range structure of the "mirror nuclei" $^3$H and $^3$He
Abstract
When protons and neutrons (nucleons) are bound into atomic nuclei, they are close enough together to feel significant attraction, or repulsion, from the strong, short-distance part of the nucleon-nucleon interaction. These strong interactions lead to hard collisions between nucleons, generating pairs of highly-energetic nucleons referred to as short-range correlations (SRCs). SRCs are an important but relatively poorly understood part of nuclear structure and mapping out the strength and isospin structure (neutron-proton vs proton-proton pairs) of these virtual excitations is thus critical input for modeling a range of nuclear, particle, and astrophysics measurements. Hitherto measurements used two-nucleon knockout or ``triple-coincidence'' reactions to measure the relative contribution of np- and pp-SRCs by knocking out a proton from the SRC and detecting its partner nucleon (proton or neutron). These measurementsshow that SRCs are almost exclusively np pairs, but had limited statistics and required large model-dependent final-state interaction (FSI) corrections. We report on the first measurement using inclusive scattering from the mirror nuclei H and He to extract the np/pp ratio of SRCs in the A=3 system. We obtain a measure of the np/pp SRC ratio that is an order of magnitude more precise than previous experiments, and find a dramatic deviation from the near-total np dominance observed in heavy nuclei. This result implies an unexpected structure in the high-momentum wavefunction for He and H. Understanding these results will improve our understanding of the short-range part of the N-N interaction.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2210.04189,
title = {Revealing the short-range structure of the "mirror nuclei" $^3$H and $^3$He},
author = {S. Li and R. Cruz-Torres and N. Santiesteban and Z. H. Ye and D. Abrams and S. Alsalmi and D. Androic and K. Aniol and J. Arrington and T. Averett and C. Ayerbe Gayoso and J. Bane and S. Barcus and J. Barrow and A. Beck and V. Bellini and H. Bhatt and D. Bhetuwal and D. Biswas and D. Bulumulla and A. Camsonne and J. Castellanos and J. Chen and J-P. Chen and D. Chrisman and M. E. Christy and C. Clarke and S. Covrig and K. Craycraft and D. Day and D. Dutta and E. Fuchey and C. Gal and F. Garibaldi and T. N. Gautam and T. Gogami and J. Gomez and P. Guèye and A. Habarakada and T. J. Hague and J. O. Hansen and F. Hauenstein and W. Henry and D. W. Higinbotham and R. J. Holt and C. Hyde and T. Itabashi and M. Kaneta and A. Karki and A. T. Katramatou and C. E. Keppel and M. Khachatryan and V. Khachatryan and P. M. King and I. Korover and L. Kurbany and T. Kutz and N. Lashley-Colthirst and W. B. Li and H. Liu and N. Liyanage and E. Long and J. Mammei and P. Markowitz and R. E. McClellan and F. Meddi and D. Meekins and S. Mey-Tal Beck and R. Michaels and M. Mihovilovič and A. Moyer and S. Nagao and V. Nelyubin and D. Nguyen and M. Nycz and M. Olson and L. Ou and V. Owen and C. Palatchi and B. Pandey and A. Papadopoulou and S. Park and S. Paul and T. Petkovic and R. Pomatsalyuk and S. Premathilake and V. Punjabi and R. D. Ransome and P. E. Reimer and J. Reinhold and S. Riordan and J. Roche and V. M. Rodriguez and A. Schmidt and B. Schmookler and E. P. Segarra and A. Shahinyan and K. Slifer and P. Solvignon and S. Širca and T. Su and R. Suleiman and H. Szumila-Vance and L. Tang and Y. Tian and W. Tireman and F. Tortorici and Y. Toyama and K. Uehara and G. M. Urciuoli and D. Votaw and J. Williamson and B. Wojtsekhowski and S. Wood and J. Zhang and X. Zheng},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.04189},
year = {2022}
}