Particle motion in a deformed potential using a transformed oscillator basis

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method using a transformed harmonic oscillator basis to accurately describe particle motion in deformed potentials, applied to 11Be, with results matching experimental data.

Contribution

The work develops a novel transformed oscillator basis approach for quantum systems in deformed potentials, improving the description of bound states and resonances.

Findings

Accurate wavefunctions and energies for 11Be states were obtained.

Electric transition probabilities matched scattering state distributions.

Calculated Coulomb breakup distributions agreed with experimental data.

Abstract

The quantum description of a particle moving in a deformed potential is investigated. A pseudostate (PS) basis is used to represent the states of the composite system. This PS basis is obtained by diagonalizing the system Hamiltonian in a family of square integrable functions. In this work the Transformed Harmonic Oscillator (THO) functions, obtained from the solutions of the Harmonic Oscillator using a Local Scale Transformation (LST), are used. The proposed method is applied to the 11Be nucleus, treated in a two-body model (10Be+n). Both structure and reaction observables have been studied. Wavefunctions and energies obtained for the bound states and some low-lying resonances are compared with those obtained by direct integration of the Schroedinger equation. The dipole and quadrupole electric transition probabilities for the low-energy continuum have been calculated in the THO basis, and compared with the exact distributions obtained with the scattering states. Finally, the method is applied to describe the 11Be states in the Coulomb breakup of 11Be+208Pb at 69 MeV/nucleon. The energy and angular distributions of the exclusive breakup have been calculated using the Equivalent Photon Method, including both E1 and E2 contributions. The calculated distributions are found to be in good agreement with the available experimental data from RIKEN [Phys. Rev. C70, 054606]. At the very forward angles, the cross section is completely dominated by the dipole couplings.