Nuclear Charge Radii of ^{10,11}B.

Abstract

The first laser spectroscopic determination of the change in the nuclear charge radius for a five-electron system is reported. This is achieved by combining high-accuracy abinitio mass-shift calculations and a high-accuracy measurement of the isotope shift in the 2s^{2}2p ^{2}P_{1/2}→2s^{2}3s ^{2}S_{1/2} ground state transition in boron atoms. Accuracy is increased by orders of magnitude for the stable isotopes ^{10,11}B and the results are used to extract their difference in the mean-square charge radius ⟨r_{c}^{2}⟩^{11}-⟨r_{c}^{2}⟩^{10}=-0.49(12) fm^{2}. The result is qualitatively explained by a possible cluster structure of the boron nuclei and quantitatively used to benchmark new abinitio nuclear structure calculations using the no-core shell model and Green's function MonteCarlo approaches. These results are the foundation for a laser spectroscopic determination of the charge radius of the proton-halo candidate ^{8}B.