Exploring universality in nuclear clusters with Halo EFT

I present results and highlight aspects of halo EFT to loosely bound systems composed of nucleons and alpha particles, with emphasis on Coulomb interactions.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures, talk given at the 21th European Conference on Few-Body Problems in Physics, Salamanca, Aug. 29th - Sep. 3rd, 201

Consistent alpha-cluster description of the 12C (0^+_2) resonance

The near-threshold 12C (0^+_2) resonance provides unique possibility for fast helium burning in stars, as predicted by Hoyle to explain the observed abundance of elements in the Universe. Properties of this resonance are calculated within the framework of the alpha-cluster model whose two-body and three-body effective potentials are tuned to describe the alpha - alpha scattering data, the energies of the 0^+_1 and 0^+_2 states, and the 0^+_1-state root-mean-square radius. The extremely small width of the 0^+_2 state, the 0_2^+ to 0_1^+ monopole transition matrix element, and transition radius are found in remarkable agreement with the experimental data. The 0^+_2-state structure is described as a system of three alpha-particles oscillating between the ground-state-like configuration and the elongated chain configuration whose probability exceeds 0.9