Nature of halo in light nuclei

Abstract

A feature peculiar to light neutron-rich nuclei is that their lowest decay thresholds are only slightly above their ground states. Among them, 6He and 11Li are two most striking examples. The energy needed to break 6He (11Li) into an alpha particle (9Li) and two neutrons is about 1 MeV (300 keV). So small a value prompts one to construct their theory by analogy with the zero-range-nuclear-force approximation previously applied to the deuteron. A more detailed analysis shows, however, that the simple version of this approximation applied to systems that decay through a three-particle channel does not take into account some important features of these systems and requires significant improvements. First, with increasing distance between three particles, the potential energy decreases, in contrast to what is observed for binary systems, in inverse proportion to the hyperradius cubed. Second, the Pauli exclusion principle adds complexity even in the asymptotic domain, and we meet its demands in constructing the 6He and 11Li wave functions in the continuum. An approach is proposed to analyze weakly bound three-cluster systems that takes into account the aforementioned features and which describes correctly the experimentally observed structure of bound and unbound states above the threshold for three-particle decay.