The isospin and neutron-to-proton excess dependence of short-range correlations

TL;DR

This study systematically analyzes how isospin composition and neutron-to-proton ratio influence short-range correlations in nuclei, revealing that minority nucleons become more correlated as neutron excess increases, aligning with experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces the use of the low-order correlation operator approximation to quantify SRC dependence on isospin and neutron-to-proton ratio across a wide range of nuclei.

Findings

Protons become more short-range correlated in neutron-rich nuclei.

The model reproduces observed high-momentum nucleon trends.

SRC composition varies systematically with nucleon momentum.

Abstract

We provide a systematic study of the isospin composition and neutron-to-proton $\left( \frac{N}{Z} \right)$ ratio dependence of nuclear short-range correlations (SRC) across the nuclear mass table. We use the low-order correlation operator approximation (LCA) to compute the SRC contribution to the single-nucleon momentum distributions for 14 different nuclei from $A=4$ to $A=208$. Ten asymmetric nuclei are included for which the neutrons outnumber the protons by a factor of up to 1.54. The computed momentum distributions are used to extract the pair composition of the SRC. We find that there is a comprehensive picture for the isospin composition of SRC and their evolution with nucleon momentum. We also compute the non-relativistic kinetic energy of neutrons and protons and its evolution with nuclear mass $A$ and $\frac{N}{Z}$. Confirming the conclusions from alternate studies it is shown that the minority species (protons) become increasingly more short-range correlated as the neutron-to-proton ratio increases. We forge connections between measured nucleon-knockout quantities sensitive to SRC and single-nucleon momentum distributions. It is shown that the LCA can account for the observed trends in the data, like the fact that in neutron-rich nuclei the protons are responsible for an unexpectedly large fraction of the high-momentum components.