Nucleon-nucleon correlations in the extreme oxygen isotopes

Abstract

There has been an upsurge of interest in two-nucleon decays thanks to the studies of nucleonnucleon correlations. In our previous work, based on a novel time-dependent three-body approach, we demonstrated that the energy and angular correlations of the emitted nucleons can shed light on the structure of nucleonic pairs formed inside the nucleus. In this work, we apply the new framework to study the decay dynamics and properties of some extreme proton-rich and neutron-rich oxygen isotopes, including two-proton (2p) decays of 11,12 O and two-neutron (2n) decay of 26 O. Here we show that the low-components of 11,12 O wave functions, which are affected by continuum and configuration-interaction effects, strongly impact decay dynamics and asymptotic correlations. In the calculated wave functions of 11,12 O, diproton and cigarlike structures merge together during the tunneling process and the resulting energy-and angular correlations are very consistent with the experimental data. The asymptotic correlations of the 2n decay of 26 O dramatically change as the two-neutron decay energy approaches the zero-energy threshold. The small reported value of Q2n suggests that the 2n decay of this nucleus can be understood in terms of the universal phase-space limit.

Recent progress in two-proton radioactivity

“…25, the angular correlation of 26 O becomes almost uniformly distributed. This is because, for small values of Q 2n , the 2n decay is dominated by the s-wave component, and the angular distribution becomes essentially isotropic [126,152,201]. This asymptotic behavior might represent an interesting avenue of research for further experimental studies.…”