Detailed description of exclusive muon capture rates using realistic two-body forces

TL;DR

This paper presents detailed calculations of exclusive muon capture rates in light and medium nuclei using a realistic nuclear force model within the pn-QRPA framework, aiming to improve understanding of weak nuclear processes relevant to astrophysics and experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a realistic pn-QRPA approach with Bonn C-D potential to accurately compute muon capture rates and contributions of specific multipolarities and weak interaction components.

Findings

Calculated total muon capture rates for various isotopes.

Analyzed contributions of low-spin multipolarities to the rates.

Separated polar-vector and axial-vector contributions for each transition.

Abstract

Starting from state-by-state calculations of exclusive rates of the ordinary muon capture (OMC), we evaluated total muon-capture rates for a set of light- and medium-weight nuclear isotopes. We employed a version of the proton-neutron quasi-particle random phase approximation (pn-QRPA, for short) which uses as realistic nuclear forces the Bonn C-D one boson exchange potential. Special attention was paid on the percentage contribution to the total muon-capture rate of specific low-spin multipolarities resulting by summing over the corresponding multipole transitions. The nuclear method used offers the possibility of estimating separately the individual contributions to the total and partial rates of the polar-vector and axial-vector components of the weak interaction Hamiltonian for each accessible final state of the daughter nucleus. One of our main goals is to provide a reliable description of the charge changing transitions matrix elements entering the description of other similar semileptonic nuclear processes like the charged-current neutrino-nucleus reactions, the electron capture on nuclei, the single \b{eta}-decay mode, etc., which play important role in currently interesting laboratory and astrophysical applications like the neutrino-detection through lepton- nucleus interaction probes, and neutrino-nucleosynthesis. Such results can be also be useful in various ongoing muon-capture experiments at PSI, Fermilab, JPARC and RCNP.