Perspectives of few-body approaches to dripline nuclei

Abstract

Present days' nuclear physics has focused on exploring fundamental nuclear matter under extreme conditions, which can be created in modern accelerator laboratories. The opportunities offered by beams of exotic nuclei for a research in the areas of nuclear-structure physics, nucleosynthesis and nuclear astrophysics are exciting, and the large worldwide activity in the construction of radioactive-beam facilities reflects the strong scientific interest in the physics that can be probed with such beams. On the neutron-rich side of stability radioactive beams have already led to the discovery of halos in nuclei with nucleonic distributions extending to large distances. Light nuclei constitute so far the part of the nuclear landscape where the neutron dripline has been reached. Subsequent developments have deepened and enriched the picture of halos as a pure quantum mechanics phenomenon, where particles can be found far from each other in classically forbidden regions. Few-body dynamics plays a crucial role in every adequate description of the discovered halo properties and just few-body methods lead at the early stage to self-consistent explanations of most of the experimental findings in halo physics. We discuss experiments that probe a halo structure through studying different reactions with halo nuclei. We discuss also theoretical methods and models based on few-body approaches, which allow to extract an accurate spectroscopic information from experiments and make predictions for future experiments.