Three-body model for the two-neutron decay of $^{16}$Be
Abstract
While diproton decay was first theorized in 1960 and first measured in 2002, it was first observed only in 2012. The measurement of Be in coincidence with two neutrons suggests that Be does decay through the simultaneous emission of two strongly correlated neutrons. In this work, we construct a full three-body model of Be (as Be + n + n) in order to investigate its configuration in the continuum and in particular the structure of its ground state. In order to describe the three-body system, effective n-Be potentials were constructed, constrained by the experimental information on Be. The hyperspherical R-matrix method was used to solve the three-body scattering problem, and the resonance energy of Be was extracted from a phase shift analysis. In order to reproduce the experimental resonance energy of Be within this three-body model, a three-body interaction was needed. For extracting the width of the ground state of Be, we use the full width at half maximum of the derivative of the three-body phase shifts and the width of the three-body elastic scattering cross section. Our results confirm a dineutron structure for Be, dependent on the internal structure of the subsystem Be.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1611.00604,
title = {Three-body model for the two-neutron decay of $^{16}$Be},
author = {A. E. Lovell and F. M. Nunes and I. J. Thompson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.00604},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
13 pages, 9 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. C