Effective field theory analysis of the Coulomb breakup of the one-neutron halo nucleus 19C

TL;DR

This paper uses Halo EFT and Coulomb-Corrected Eikonal approximation to analyze the Coulomb breakup of 19C, providing insights into its ground state properties and constraining its one-neutron separation energy and ANC.

Contribution

It introduces a combined EFT and reaction model approach to extract ground state properties of 19C from Coulomb breakup data.

Findings

Fair reproduction of measured cross sections at leading order

Insensitivity to optical potential and interior wave function details

Constraints on one-neutron separation energy and ANC of 19C

Abstract

We analyse the Coulomb breakup of 19C measured at 67A MeV at RIKEN. We use the Coulomb-Corrected Eikonal (CCE) approximation to model the reaction and describe the one-neutron halo nucleus 19C within Halo Effective Field Theory (EFT). At leading order we obtain a fair reproduction of the measured cross section as a function of energy and angle. The description is insensitive to the choice of optical potential, as long as it accurately represents the size of 18C. It is also insensitive to the interior of the 19C wave function. Comparison between theory and experiment thus enables us to infer asymptotic properties of the ground state of 19C: these data put constraints on the one-neutron separation energy of this nucleus and, for a given binding energy, can be used to extract an asymptotic normalisation coefficient (ANC). These results are confirmed by CCE calculations employing next-to-leading order Halo EFT descriptions of 19C: at this order the results for the Coulomb breakup cross section are completely insensitive to the choice of the regulator. Accordingly, this reaction can be used to constrain the one-neutron separation energy and ANC of 19C.