Exploring the Most Exotic Nuclei with MINOS at the RIBF

Abstract

Rare isotopes, both by their significant neutron-over-proton unbalance or their weak binding, offer unique features to understand atomic nuclei. The completion of facilities dedicated to produce radioactive ion beams worldwide has allowed one to span new regions of the nuclear landscape where new properties of nuclei, in particular the evolution of shell structure, can be investigated. It is now established that the nuclear shell structure, as unraveled from stable nuclei, is not universal across the entire nuclear chart but evolves depending on which neutron and proton orbitals are occupied. Intensive theoretical efforts driven by new experimental findings have led to clarification of microscopic mechanisms for such changes and their predictions are confronted to further observations. Away from stability, the shell model picture of a nucleus can also be subject to significant modifications due to low binding energy of Fermi nucleons. New phenomena have been observed in the past decades. The development of weakly bound neutron halos occurs in light nuclei at the neutron drip-line, as well as strong nucleonic correlations under the form of alpha clustering. Many quantum phenomena related to rare isotopes raise fundamental questions that remain to be solved: Can we reach a universal description of nuclear structure? What are the origins of shell evolution? How do the di-neutron correlations appear in Borromean nuclei? What are the conditions for clustering to emerge? What is the role of the underlying structure of nucleons in low-energy nuclear physics?