Reactions with a ¹⁰Be beam to study the one-neutron halo nucleus ¹¹Be

Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee 37996, USA

^a e-mail: kgrzywac@utk.edu

Published online: 11 July 2016

Abstract

Halo nuclei are excellent examples of few-body systems consisting of a core and weakly-bound halo nucleons. Where there is only one nucleon in the halo, as in ¹¹Be, the many-body problem can be reduced to a two-body problem. The contribution of the 1s_1/2 orbital to the ground state configuration in ¹¹Be, characterized by the spectroscopic factor, S, has been extracted from direct reaction data by many groups over the past five decades with discrepant results. An experiment was performed at the Holifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility using a ¹⁰Be primary beam at four different energies with the goal of resolving the discrepancy through a consistent analysis of elastic, inelastic, and transfer channels. Faddeev-type calculations, released after the publication of the experimental results, show that dynamic core excitation in the transfer process can lead to reduced differential cross sections at higher beam energies. This reduction would lead to the extraction of decreasing values of S with increasing beam energy. A ¹⁰Be(d,p) measurement at E_d greater than 25 MeV is necessary to investigate the effects of core excitation in the reaction.