English

Universal Properties of Near-Threshold Single-Neutron Resonances

Nuclear Theory 2026-07-16 v1

Abstract

We establish universal width predictions for near-threshold single-neutron resonances in L>0L > 0 partial waves. Our results go beyond Wigner's well-known scaling behavior of cross sections near threshold. We show that the finite square-well potential exhibits discrete scale invariance at zero energy. From this fact, we derive an analytic baseline for the resonance width that depends only on geometry, angular momentum, and resonance energy, and not on internal short-distance nuclear details or radial excitation. This is a nontrivial property that is unique to the finite square-well potential and does not occur for other potentials. Application to observed p-wave and d-wave resonances demonstrates that the square-well result provides a robust baseline. We show that discrete scale invariance erases radial-node information in the sharp-boundary limit, but realistic Woods-Saxon diffuseness breaks this invariance, suppressing the reduced width by a factor sensitive to the internal radial excitation. These results provide a simple geometric benchmark for identifying when observed neutron resonances are controlled by universal threshold physics and when they exhibit systematic deviations driven by structure-dependent effects.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.14464,
  title  = {Universal Properties of Near-Threshold Single-Neutron Resonances},
  author = {Myungkuk Kim and Young-Ho Song and Hans-Werner Hammer and Youngman Kim and Dean Lee and Yuan-Zhuo Ma},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.14464},
  year   = {2026}
}