Universal laws for nuclear contacts

TL;DR

This paper extends the universal laws relating nuclear contacts to nuclear radii across the nuclear chart using advanced nuclear models, confirming their broad applicability and highlighting the long-range nature of short-range nucleon pairs.

Contribution

It applies the YPB laws within the Skyrme Hartree-Fock-Bogolyubov model to a wide range of nuclei, demonstrating their validity beyond initial small-scale tests.

Findings

YPB laws hold across various nuclear mass regions

Minor deviations due to isospin-breaking effects

Supports the long-range nature of short-range nucleon pairs

Abstract

The nuclear contact characterizes the nucleon-nucleon pairs in close proximity and serves as an important tool for studying the short-range correlations (SRCs) within atomic nuclei. While they have been extracted for selected nuclei, the investigation of their behavior across the nuclear chart remains limited. Very recently, Yankovich, Pazy, and Barnea have proposed a set of universal laws (YPB laws) to describe the correlation between nuclear contacts and nuclear radii and tested their laws for a small number of nuclei by using the Woods-Saxon mean-field model~[R.\ Yankovich, E.\ Pazy, and N.\ Barnea, arXiv:2407.15068 (2021)]. In this Letter, we extend their study to a majority part of the chart of nuclides within the framework of the Skyrme Hartree-Fock-Bogolyubov model, which incorporates several essential beyond-mean-field features and offers a more accurate description of the bulk properties of atomic nuclei. Our results suggest that the YPB laws hold as a good approximation for different nuclear mass regions, with minor deviations attributed to, e.g., isospin-breaking effects. Our work lays a firm foundation for future applications of the YPB laws in finite nuclei and provides new evidence for the long-range nature of the relative abundance of short-range pairs.