Two-neutron overlap functions for 6He from a microscopic structure model

TL;DR

This paper develops a microscopic model for 6He, accurately reproducing its properties and revealing significant effects of antisymmetrization on two-neutron overlap functions.

Contribution

It introduces a fully antisymmetrized hyper-spherical basis model for light halo nuclei, improving the understanding of microscopic effects on two-neutron overlaps.

Findings

Reproduces 6He separation energy and halo radius accurately.

Finds antisymmetrization effects are crucial for binding.

Identifies 30%-70% increase in overlap normalization due to microscopic effects.

Abstract

A fully antisymmetrized microscopic model is developed for light two-neutron halo nuclei using a hyper-spherical basis to describe halo regions. The many-body wavefunction is optimized variationally. The model is applied to 6He bound by semi realistic Minnesota nucleon-nucleon forces. The two-neutron separation energy and the radius of the halo are reproduced in agreement with experiment. Antisymmetrization effects between 4He and halo neutrons are found to be crucial for binding of 6He. We also properly extract two-neutron overlap functions and find that there is a significant increase of 30%-70% in their normalization due to microscopic effects as compared to the results of three-body models.