Neutron transfer reactions in halo effective field theory

Abstract

Direct reaction experiments provide a powerful tool to probe the structure of neutron-rich nuclei like beryllium-11. We use halo effective field theory to calculate the cross section of the deuteroninduced neutron transfer reaction 10 Be(d, p) 11 Be. The effective theory contains dynamical fields for the beryllium-10 core, the neutron, and the proton. In contrast, the deuteron and the beryllium-11 halo nucleus are generated dynamically from contact interactions using experimental and ab initio input. Breakup contributions are then included by construction. The reaction amplitude is constructed up to next-to-leading order in an expansion in the ratio of the length scales characterizing the core and the halo. The Coulomb repulsion between core and proton is treated perturbatively. Finally, we compare our results to cross-section data and other calculations. arXiv:1812.09152v2 [nucl-th]

Simulating core excitation in breakup reactions of halo nuclei using an effective three-body force

“…The results produced here confirm that Halo EFT [10] is an efficient and flexible tool for reactions involving halo nuclei [11,14,15,28]. In EFT the appearance of three-body forces is essential, since they account for the impact of missing degrees of freedom on observables [22].…”

Nuclear effective field theory: status and perspectives

“…Halo EFT promises a quantitative description on the same footing of both nuclear structure and reactions of clusterized systems and exotic isotopes, which is is a major challenge of contemporary nuclear theory. Nuclear reactions have been investigated both in strict Halo EFT (Schmidt et al, 2019) as well as in accurate phenomenological models of reactions with a Halo EFT motivated description of the projectile (Yang and Capel, 2018;Capel et al, 2018). As we have seen, many of these reactions have impact on astrophysical processes and even on the quantification of nuclear uncertainties in experimental anomalies.…”

Combining Halo-EFT Descriptions of Nuclei and Precise Models of Nuclear Reactions

“…Recently, efforts to describe both the halo nucleus and the reaction process within EFT have been made [19][20][21]. Although the perturbative approach used in these papers to simulate the reaction provides a correct qualitative estimate of the process, higher-order effects, such as couplings within the continuum [22][23][24] and Coulomb-nuclear interferences [25], need to be accounted for to reach the quantitative level.…”