DEPARTMENT OF NUCLEAR PHYSICS - NUCLEAR ENGINEERING - MEDICAL PHYSICS

We propose a new approach to probe the spatial extension of the valence neutron orbital in the ⁹Be nucleus via the ⁹Be(p,pn)⁸Be knockout reaction. This property of the nuclear molecular orbital has not been established in previous experimental studies and divergence exists between the theoretical descriptions of ⁹Be from different perspectives, i.e., the antisymmetrized molecular dynamics and the container pictures of cluster dynamics. These pictures are represented by two different well-proven microscopic models, the antisymmetrized molecular dynamics (AMD) and Tohsaki-Horiuchi-Schuck-Röpke (THSR) wave functions. The corresponding reduced width amplitudes (RWAs) in the ⁸Be+n channel are extracted from both the AMD and THSR wave functions, and they are found to describe drastically different valence-nucleon motion, which shows the theoretical ambiguity in describing the π-orbitals in ⁹Be. Using the RWAs as input, the physical observables of the ⁹Be(p,pn)⁸Be knockout reaction are predicted by the distorted-wave impulse approximation (DWIA) framework. The magnitudes of the triple-differential cross sections (TDX) are found to be highly sensitive to the RWA input. It is concluded that the ⁹Be(p,pn)⁸Be knockout reaction could provide a feasible probing for the subtle differences between several structure models manifesting through the spatial extension of the π-orbital in the ⁹Be nucleus.

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