Effects of Coulomb and isospin symmetry breaking interactions on neutron-skin thickness

TL;DR

This paper investigates how Coulomb and isospin symmetry breaking interactions influence neutron-skin thickness in nuclei, finding that strong interaction ISB terms can significantly affect symmetry energy estimates.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the effects of Coulomb and ISB interactions on neutron-skin thickness and symmetry energy, highlighting the non-negligible role of strong interaction ISB terms.

Findings

Coulomb corrections negligibly affect neutron-skin thickness

Strong interaction ISB terms can influence symmetry energy estimates by up to 12 MeV

ISB effects are significant for understanding nuclear symmetry energy

Abstract

Both the Coulomb interaction and isospin symmetry breaking (ISB) parts of the nuclear interaction break the isospin symmetry in atomic nuclei. Effects of these two kinds of interaction on properties of atomic nuclei, especially, the mass difference of mirror nuclei and the neutron-skin thickness of $ N = Z $ and $ N \ne Z $ nuclei, are discussed. It is found that corrections to the Hartree-Fock-Slater approximation for the Coulomb interaction negligibly affect the neutron-skin thickness, while the charge-symmetry breaking term originating from the strong interaction might affect it non-negligibly. According to our calculations, the ISB terms other than the Coulomb interaction affect the estimation of the density dependence of the symmetry energy, $ L $, by about $ 0 $--$ 12 \, \mathrm{MeV} $ using the correlation with the neutron-skin thickness.