Halo nuclei 6He and 8He with the Coulomb-Sturmian basis

TL;DR

This paper introduces Coulomb-Sturmian basis functions for ab initio nuclear calculations, improving the description of halo nuclei by better capturing their asymptotic exponential decay.

Contribution

It presents a novel basis for NCCI calculations that enhances the modeling of halo nuclei's wave functions compared to traditional oscillator bases.

Findings

Successful NCCI calculations for 6He and 8He using Coulomb-Sturmian basis

More accurate estimates of radii for halo nuclei

Comparison with baseline 4He results

Abstract

The rapid Gaussian falloff of the oscillator functions at large radius makes them poorly suited for the description of the asymptotic properties of the nuclear wave function, a problem which becomes particularly acute for halo nuclei. We consider an alternative basis for ab initio no-core configuration interaction (NCCI) calculations, built from Coulomb-Sturmian radial functions, allowing for realistic exponential falloff. NCCI calculations are carried out for the neutron halo nuclei 6,8He, as well as the baseline case 4He, with the JISP16 nucleon-nucleon interaction. Estimates are made for the root-mean-square radii of the proton and matter distributions.