High-Energy Reactions and the Evidence for Correlations in the Nuclear Ground-State Wave Function

Abstract

High-energy nuclear reactions which depend strongly on nucleon position correlations in the nuclear ground state are analyzed and shown to give evidence for the existence of marked correlation effects. The following high-energy experiments are considered: nuclear photoeffect, meson absorption in nuclei, deuteron pickup, proton-proton scattering in a nucleus, and meson production in proton-nucleus collisions. The corresponding cross sections depend on a nucleon momentum distribution which can be represented at high energies by a single function giving reasonable agreement with all the experiments considered. This momomentum distribution differs substantially from that for the shell model of the nucleus and thus provides strong evidence for correlation in the nuclear ground-state wave function.The transformation methods developed in previous papers are used to provide a unified theory of the above five processes. The momentum distribution predicted by this theory is estimated by two methods each of which gives close agreement with the experimentally determined function in the relevant energy ranges.