1. Revealing the short-range structure of the 'mirror nuclei' $^3$H and $^3$He
- Author
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Li, S., Cruz-Torres, R., Santiesteban, N., Ye, Z. H., Abrams, D., Alsalmi, S., Androic, D., Aniol, K., Arrington, J., Averett, T., Gayoso, C. Ayerbe, Bane, J., Barcus, S., Barrow, J., Beck, A., Bellini, V., Bhatt, H., Bhetuwal, D., Biswas, D., Bulumulla, D., Camsonne, A., Castellanos, J., Chen, J., Chen, J-P., Chrisman, D., Christy, M. E., Clarke, C., Covrig, S., Craycraft, K., Day, D., Dutta, D., Fuchey, E., Gal, C., Garibaldi, F., Gautam, T. N., Gogami, T., Gomez, J., Guèye, P., Habarakada, A., Hague, T. J., Hansen, J. O., Hauenstein, F., Henry, W., Higinbotham, D. W., Holt, R. J., Hyde, C., Itabashi, T., Kaneta, M., Karki, A., Katramatou, A. T., Keppel, C. E., Khachatryan, M., Khachatryan, V., King, P. M., Korover, I., Kurbany, L., Kutz, T., Lashley-Colthirst, N., Li, W. B., Liu, H., Liyanage, N., Long, E., Mammei, J., Markowitz, P., McClellan, R. E., Meddi, F., Meekins, D., Beck, S. Mey-Tal, Michaels, R., Mihovilovič, M., Moyer, A., Nagao, S., Nelyubin, V., Nguyen, D., Nycz, M., Olson, M., Ou, L., Owen, V., Palatchi, C., Pandey, B., Papadopoulou, A., Park, S., Paul, S., Petkovic, T., Pomatsalyuk, R., Premathilake, S., Punjabi, V., Ransome, R. D., Reimer, P. E., Reinhold, J., Riordan, S., Roche, J., Rodriguez, V. M., Schmidt, A., Schmookler, B., Segarra, E. P., Shahinyan, A., Slifer, K., Solvignon, P., Širca, S., Su, T., Suleiman, R., Szumila-Vance, H., Tang, L., Tian, Y., Tireman, W., Tortorici, F., Toyama, Y., Uehara, K., Urciuoli, G. M., Votaw, D., Williamson, J., Wojtsekhowski, B., Wood, S., Zhang, J., and Zheng, X.
- Subjects
Nuclear Experiment ,High Energy Physics - Experiment ,Nuclear Theory - Abstract
When protons and neutrons (nucleons) are bound into atomic nuclei, they are close enough together to feel significant attraction, or repulsion, from the strong, short-distance part of the nucleon-nucleon interaction. These strong interactions lead to hard collisions between nucleons, generating pairs of highly-energetic nucleons referred to as short-range correlations (SRCs). SRCs are an important but relatively poorly understood part of nuclear structure and mapping out the strength and isospin structure (neutron-proton vs proton-proton pairs) of these virtual excitations is thus critical input for modeling a range of nuclear, particle, and astrophysics measurements. Hitherto measurements used two-nucleon knockout or ``triple-coincidence'' reactions to measure the relative contribution of np- and pp-SRCs by knocking out a proton from the SRC and detecting its partner nucleon (proton or neutron). These measurementsshow that SRCs are almost exclusively np pairs, but had limited statistics and required large model-dependent final-state interaction (FSI) corrections. We report on the first measurement using inclusive scattering from the mirror nuclei $^3$H and $^3$He to extract the np/pp ratio of SRCs in the A=3 system. We obtain a measure of the np/pp SRC ratio that is an order of magnitude more precise than previous experiments, and find a dramatic deviation from the near-total np dominance observed in heavy nuclei. This result implies an unexpected structure in the high-momentum wavefunction for $^3$He and $^3$H. Understanding these results will improve our understanding of the short-range part of the N-N interaction.
- Published
- 2022
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