Short-range correlations in dynamical intranuclear cascade models for describing nucleon knockout reactions

Abstract

Spallation and fragmentation reactions at incident energies above the Fermi momentum are considered to be the main mechanism for the production of neutron-rich nuclei at worldwide nuclear physics facilities, such as RIBF, FRIB, and GSI-FAIR. Although it is widely known that dynamical reaction models give a rather good prediction of cross sections for nuclear residues produced in spallation and fragmentation reactions, these reaction models fail in the description of peripheral collisions involving short-range nucleon-nucleon correlations (SRCs). Here, we present state-of-the-art dynamical reaction calculations based on the intranuclear cascade approach to describe spallation and fragmentation reactions. The new version of our dynamical model, including SRCs, successfully describes isotopic cross sections of neutron-rich nuclear residues and inclusive single-neutron and single-proton knockout cross sections for various stable and exotic nuclei. Finally, the results show that the systematic strong dependency of the single-knockout cross section reduction factor on the neutron-proton separation energy asymmetry parameter (ΔS) obtained by Tostevin and Gade disappears when SRCs are taken into account.