Nuclear fragmentation reactions as a probe of neutron skins in nuclei

TL;DR

This paper explores how nuclear fragmentation reactions can be used to probe neutron skins in nuclei, aiming to connect microscopic interactions with the symmetry energy of the nuclear equation of state relevant for neutron star structure.

Contribution

It compares experimental neutron skin data with theoretical models and assesses the potential of neutron-changing reactions to determine neutron skin isospin dependence.

Findings

No definitive EoS conclusion due to experimental uncertainties.

Comparison shows wide variation in neutron skin measurements.

Neutron-changing reactions have potential for isospin dependence assessment.

Abstract

We investigate the contributions of various reaction channels to the interaction, reaction, charge-changing and neutron-changing cross sections. The goal is to investigate the relation between microscopic interactions and the symmetry energy component of the equation of state (EoS) of interest for the structure of neutron stars. We have made a comparison of the neutron skins extracted from diverse experimental techniques with those obtained with Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov calculations with 23 Skyrme and with 8 density-dependent interactions used in the relativistic mean field method. We have shown that no particular conclusion can be drawn on the best EoS in view of the wide range of uncertainty in the experimental data. We have further investigated the prospects of using neutron-changing reactions to assess the isospin dependence of the neutron-skin in neutron-rich nuclei.