Hard probes of short-range nucleon-nucleon correlations

Understand

One of the primary goals of nuclear physics is providing a complete description of the structure of atomic nuclei.

• While mean-field calculations provide detailed information on the nuclear shell structure for a wide range of nuclei, they do not capture the complete structure of nuclei, in particular the impact of small, dense structures in nuclei.
• The strong, short-range component of the nucleon-nucleon potential yields hard interactions between nucleons which are close together, generating a high-momentum tail to the nucleon momentum distribution, with momenta well in excess of the Fermi momentum.
• This high-momentum component of the nuclear wave-function is one of the most poorly understood parts of nuclear structure.