Eur. Phys. J. A (2017) 53: 119
https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/i2017-12300-0

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Alpha-clustering effects on ¹⁶O(,np)¹⁴N in the quasi-deuteron region

¹ Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 201800, Shanghai, China
² University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100049, Beijing, China
³ ShanghaiTech University, 200031, Shanghai, China
⁴ Institute of Modern Physics, Fudan University, 200433, Shanghai, China

^* e-mail: ygma@sinap.ac.cn

Received: 4 February 2017
Accepted: 28 April 2017
Published online: 12 June 2017

Abstract

Photonuclear reaction in the quasi-deuteron regime has been investigated in an extended Quantum Molecular Dynamics model at a photon energy of 70-120 MeV. Particularly, the reaction channel of ¹⁶O(,np)¹⁴N is focused where ¹⁶O is considered as having different -clustering configurations as well as regular spherical structure. Because of three-body decay from the above photonuclear reaction, we can investigate many observables including the recoil momentum, missing energy, pair momentum/energy and opening angle of ejected neutron and proton, hyper-angle and hyper-radius distributions, etc. These quantitative results demonstrate an obvious difference among different initial configurations of ¹⁶O, which can be attributed to the spatial-momentum correlation of a neutron-proton pair inside the nucleus. The results illustrate that photonuclear reaction is a good tool to explore different -clustering structures.