Final-state interactions and spin structure in $E1$ breakup of $^11$Li in Halo EFT

TL;DR

This paper models the $E1$ breakup of $^{11}$Li as a three-body system using Halo EFT, emphasizing the importance of neutron-neutron FSI and spin interactions, achieving good experimental agreement.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic expansion scheme for FSI in Halo EFT and analyzes the impact of neutron-core spin interactions on the $E1$ response.

Findings

Neutron-neutron FSI dominates the $E1$ distribution.

Including neutron-core FSI shifts the peak to lower energies.

Matching experimental data requires spin interactions in both channels.

Abstract

We calculate the $E1$ breakup of the $2n$ halo nucleus $^{11}$Li in Halo Effective Field Theory (Halo EFT) at leading order. In Halo EFT, $^{11}$Li is treated as a three-body system of a $^{9}$Li core and two neutrons. We present a detailed investigation of final-state interactions (FSI) in the neutron-neutron $(nn)$ and neutron-core $(nc)$ channels. We employ Moller operators to formulate an expansion scheme that satisfies the non-energy-weighted cluster sum rule and successively includes higher-order terms in the multiple-scattering series for the FSI. Computing the $E1$ strength up to third order in this scheme, we observe apparent convergence and good agreement with experiment. The neutron-neutron FSI is by far the most important contribution and largely determines the maximum value of the $E1$ distribution. However, inclusion of $nc$ FSI does shift the peak position to slightly lower energies. Moreover, we investigate the sensitivity of the $E1$ response to the spin structure of the neutron-${}^9$Li interaction. We contrast results for an interaction that is the same in the spin-1 and spin-2 channels with one that is only operative in the spin-2 channel, and find that good agreement with experimental data is only obtained if the interaction is present in both spin channels. The latter case is shown to be equivalent to a calculation in which the spin of $^9$Li is neglected.