Microscopic description of light unstable nuclei with the stochastic variational method

The structure of the light proton and neutron rich nuclei is studied in a microscopic multicluster model using the stochastic variational method. This approach enables us to describe the weakly bound nature of these nuclei in a consistent way. Applications for various nuclei $^{6-9}$Li, $^7$Be, $^8$B, $^9$C, $^{9-10}$Be, $^{9-10}$B presented. The paper discusses the relation of this model to other models as well as the possible extension for p and sd shell nuclei.Comment: 11 pages, latex, no figures

Effective field theory description of halo nuclei

Nuclear halos emerge as new degrees of freedom near the neutron and proton driplines. They consist of a core and one or a few nucleons which spend most of their time in the classically-forbidden region outside the range of the interaction. Individual nucleons inside the core are thus unresolved in the halo configuration, and the low-energy effective interactions are short-range forces between the core and the valence nucleons. Similar phenomena occur in clusters of $^4$He atoms, cold atomic gases near a Feshbach resonance, and some exotic hadrons. In these weakly-bound quantum systems universal scaling laws for s-wave binding emerge that are independent of the details of the interaction. Effective field theory (EFT) exposes these correlations and permits the calculation of non-universal corrections to them due to short-distance effects, as well as the extension of these ideas to systems involving the Coulomb interaction and/or binding in higher angular-momentum channels. Halo nuclei exhibit all these features. Halo EFT, the EFT for halo nuclei, has been used to compute the properties of single-neutron, two-neutron, and single-proton halos of s-wave and p-wave type. This review summarizes these results for halo binding energies, radii, Coulomb dissociation, and radiative capture, as well as the connection of these properties to scattering parameters, thereby elucidating the universal correlations between all these observables. We also discuss how Halo EFT's encoding of the long-distance physics of halo nuclei can be used to check and extend ab initio calculations that include detailed modeling of their short-distance dynamics.Comment: 104 pages, 31 figures. Topical Review for Journal of Physics G. v2 incorporates several modifications, particularly to the Introduction, in response to referee reports. It also corrects multiple typos in the original submission. It corresponds to the published versio

Parallel HOP: A Scalable Halo Finder for Massive Cosmological Data Sets

Modern N-body cosmological simulations contain billions ($10^9$) of dark matter particles. These simulations require hundreds to thousands of gigabytes of memory, and employ hundreds to tens of thousands of processing cores on many compute nodes. In order to study the distribution of dark matter in a cosmological simulation, the dark matter halos must be identified using a halo finder, which establishes the halo membership of every particle in the simulation. The resources required for halo finding are similar to the requirements for the simulation itself. In particular, simulations have become too extensive to use commonly-employed halo finders, such that the computational requirements to identify halos must now be spread across multiple nodes and cores. Here we present a scalable-parallel halo finding method called Parallel HOP for large-scale cosmological simulation data. Based on the halo finder HOP, it utilizes MPI and domain decomposition to distribute the halo finding workload across multiple compute nodes, enabling analysis of much larger datasets than is possible with the strictly serial or previous parallel implementations of HOP. We provide a reference implementation of this method as a part of the toolkit yt, an analysis toolkit for Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) data that includes complementary analysis modules. Additionally, we discuss a suite of benchmarks that demonstrate that this method scales well up to several hundred tasks and datasets in excess of $2000^3$ particles. The Parallel HOP method and our implementation can be readily applied to any kind of N-body simulation data and is therefore widely applicable.Comment: 29 pages, 11 figures, 2 table

Coulomb and nuclear breakup of a halo nucleus 11Be

Breakup reactions of the one-neutron halo nucleus 11Be on Pb and C targets at about 70 MeV/u have been investigated by measuring the momentum vectors of the incident 11Be, outgoing 10Be, and neutron in coincidence. The relative energy spectra as well as the angular distributions of the 10Be+n center of mass have been extracted for both targets. For the breakup on Pb target, the selection of forward scattering angles is found to be effective to extract almost purely the first-order E1 Coulomb breakup component, and to exclude the nuclear contribution and higher-order Coulomb breakup components. This angle-selected energy spectrum is thus used to deduce the spectroscopic factor for the 10Be(0+) 2s_1/2 configuration in 11Be which is found to be 0.72+-0.04 with B(E1) up to Ex=4 MeV of 1.05+-0.06 e2fm2. The energy weighted E1 strength up to Ex=4 MeV explains 70+-10% of the cluster sum rule, consistent with the obtained spectroscopic factor. The non-energy weighted sum rule is used to extract the root mean square distance of the halo neutron to be 5.77(16) fm, consistent with previously known values. In the breakup with C target, we have observed the excitations to the known unbound states in 11Be at Ex=1.78 MeV and 3.41 MeV. Angular distributions for these states show the diffraction pattern characteristic of L=2 transitions, resulting in J^pi =(3/2,5/2)+ assignment for these states. We finally find that even for the C target the E1 Coulomb direct breakup mechanism becomes dominant at very forward angles.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication on Physical Review

Probing the 6He halo structure with elastic and inelastic proton scattering

Proton elastic scattering and inelastic scattering to the first excited state of 6He have been measured over a wide angular range using a 40.9A MeV 6He beam. The data have been analyzed with a fully microscopic model of proton-nucleus scattering using 6He wave functions generated from large space shell model calculations. The inelastic scattering data show a remarkable sensitivity to the halo structure of 6He.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures. RevTeX. Replaced figure 3 with updated figur

Interplay of static and dynamic effects in 6He+ 238U Fusion

We investigate the influence of the neutron halo and the breakup channel in 6He + 238U fusion at near-barrier energies. To include static effects of the 2n-halo in 6He nuclei, we use a single-folding potential obtained from an appropriate nucleon-238U interaction and a realistic 6He density. Dynamical effects arising from the breakup process are then included through coupled-channel calculations. These calculations suggest that static effects dominate the cross section at energies above the Coulomb barrier, while the sub-barrier fusion cross section appears to be determined by coupling to the breakup channel. This last conclusion is uncertain due to the procedure employed to measure the fusion cross-section.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure