Revisiting the extraction of charge radii of 40Ca and 208Pb with muonic atom spectroscopy

Abstract

The extractions of nuclear charge radii from muonic atom spectroscopy for 40Ca and 208Pb are revisited to analyze the model dependencies induced by employing a Fermi-type charge distribution. For that, the charge densities, together with the corresponding muonic transition energies, calculated by the covariant density functional theory are used as a benchmark. The root-mean-square deviation of transition energies is calculated to quantitatively investigate the sensitivities of transition energies to the details of the two-parameter Fermi distribution. It is found that the second and fourth moments of the charge distribution can be extracted accurately from the muonic atom spectroscopy without much model dependencies, whereas the obtained two-parameter Fermi distributions cannot reproduce the details of the benchmarking charge densities and, in particular, its surface-diffuseness parameter cannot be determined accurately with the present experimental uncertainties on the muonic transition energies.