Coulomb Excitation of Deuteron in Peripheral Collisions with a Heavy Ion

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new ab initio, non-perturbative time-dependent method to study nuclear structure and reactions, demonstrated through Coulomb excitation of a deuteron by a heavy ion, revealing detailed excitation dynamics.

Contribution

The paper develops a unified, ab initio, time-dependent approach for nuclear structure and scattering, applied here to Coulomb excitation of deuteron, incorporating realistic interactions and continuum discretization.

Findings

Detailed internal transition probabilities of deuteron during excitation

Time evolution of charge distribution reveals excitation dynamics

Method successfully models coupled nuclear structure and scattering processes

Abstract

We develop an ab initio, non-perturbative, time-dependent Basis Function (tBF) method to solve the nuclear structure and scattering problems in a unified manner. We apply this method to a test problem: the Coulomb excitation of a trapped deuteron by an impinging heavy ion. The states of the deuteron system are obtained by the ab initio nuclear structure calculation implementing a realistic inter-nucleon interaction with a weak external trap to localize the center of mass and to discretize the continuum. The evolution of the internal state of the deuteron system is directly solved using the equation of motion for the scattering. We analyze the excitation mechanism of the deuteron system by investigating its internal transition probabilities and observables as functions of the exposure time and the incident speed. In this investigation, the dynamics of the Coulomb excitation are revealed by the time evolution of the system's internal charge distribution.