Multiple Mechanisms in Proton-Induced Nucleon Removal at $\sim$100 MeV/Nucleon

TL;DR

This study investigates various reaction mechanisms involved in proton-induced nucleon removal from $^{14}$O at 100 MeV/nucleon, highlighting the significant roles of inelastic scattering and nucleon transfer in the process.

Contribution

It provides the first quantitative analysis of multiple reaction mechanisms, including quasifree knockout, inelastic scattering, and nucleon transfer, in proton-induced nucleon removal at intermediate energies.

Findings

Inelastic scattering contributes about 50% to proton removal.

Nucleon transfer accounts for approximately 30% of neutron removal.

Multiple mechanisms significantly influence inclusive cross sections at this energy.

Abstract

We report on the first proton-induced single proton- and neutron-removal reactions from the neutron-deficient $^{14}$O nucleus with large Fermi-surface asymmetry $S_n-S_p$ = 18.6 MeV at $\sim$100 MeV/nucleon, a widely used energy regime for rare-isotope studies. The measured inclusive cross sections and parallel momentum distributions of the $^{13}$N and $^{13}$O residues are compared to the state-of-the-art reaction models, with nuclear structure inputs from many-body shell-model calculations. Our results provide the first quantitative contributions of multiple reaction mechanisms including the quasifree knockout, inelastic scattering and nucleon transfer processes. It is shown that the inelastic scattering and nucleon transfer, usually neglected at such energy regime, contribute about 50% and 30% to the loosely bound proton and deeply bound neutron removal, respectively. These multiple reaction mechanisms should be considered in analyses of inclusive one-nucleon removal cross sections measured at intermediate energies for quantitative investigation of single-particle strengths and correlations in atomic nuclei.