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We review recent results on intermediate mass cluster production in heavy ion collisions at Fermi energy and in spallation reactions. Our studies are based on modern transport theories, employing effective interactions for the nuclear mean-field and incorporating two-body correlations and fluctuations. Namely we will consider the Stochastic Mean Field (SMF) approach and the recently developed Boltzmann-Langevin One Body (BLOB) model. We focus on cluster production emerging from the possible occurrence of low-density mean-field instabilities in heavy ion reactions. Within such a framework, the respective role of one and two-body effects, in the two models considered, will be carefully analysed. We will discuss, in particular, fragment production in central and semi-peripheral heavy ion collisions, which is the object of many recent experimental investigations. Moreover, in the context of spallation reactions, we will show how thermal expansion may trigger the development of mean-field instabilities, leading to a cluster formation process which competes with important re-aggregation effects.
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Perturbing fluids of neutrons and protons (nuclear matter) may lead, as the most catastrophic effect, to the rearrangement of the fluid into clusters of nucleons. A similar process may occur in a single atomic nucleus undergoing a violent perturbation, like in heavy-ion collisions tracked in particle accelerators at around 30 to 50 MeV per nucleon: in this conditions, after the initial collision shock, the nucleus expands and then clusterises into several smaller nuclear fragments. Microscopically, when violent perturbation are applied to nuclear matter, a process of clusterisation arises from the combination of several fluctuation modes of large-amplitude where neutrons and protons may oscillate in phase or out of phase. The imposed perturbation leads to conditions of instability, the wavelengths which are the most amplified have sizes comparable to small atomic nuclei. We found that these conditions, explored in heavy-ion collisions, correspond to the splitting of a nucleus into fragments ranging from Oxygen to Neon in a time interval shorter than one zeptosecond (10$^{-21}$s). From the out-of-phase oscillations of neutrons and protons another property arises, the smaller fragments belonging to a more volatile phase get more neutron enriched: in the heavy-ion collision case this process, called distillation, reflects in the isotopic distributions of the fragments. The resulting dynamical description of heavy-ion collisions is an improvement with respect to more usual statistical approaches, based on the equilibrium assumption. It allows in fact to characterise also the very fast early stages of the collision process which are out of equilibrium. Such dynamical description is the core of the Boltzmann-Langevin One Body (BLOB) model, which unifies in a common description fluctuations in nuclear matter and the disintegration of nuclei into nuclear fragments.
We demonstrate, within symmetry unrestricted time-dependent density functional theory, the existence of new effects in low-energy nuclear reactions which originate from superfluidity. The dynamics of the pairing field induces solitonic excitations in the colliding nuclear systems, leading to qualitative changes in the reaction dynamics. The solitonic excitation prevents collective energy dissipation and effectively suppresses fusion cross section. We demonstrate how the variations of the total kinetic energy of the fragments can be traced back to the energy stored in the superfluid junction of colliding nuclei. Both contact time and scattering angle in non-central collisions are significantly affected. The modification of the fusion cross section and possibilities for its experimental detection are discussed.
Within the Time Dependent Hartree Fock (TDHF) approach, we investigate the impact of several ingredients of the nuclear effective interaction, such as incompressibility, symmetry energy, effective mass, derivative of the Lane potential and surface terms on the exit channel (fusion vs quasifission) observed in the reaction $^{238}$U+$^{40}$Ca, close to the Coulomb barrier. Our results show that all the ingredients listed above contribute to the competition between fusion and quasifission processes, however the leading role in determining the outcome of the reaction is played by incompressibility, symmetry energy and the isoscalar coefficient of the surface term. This study unravels the complexity of the fusion and quasifission reaction dynamics and helps to understand the microscopic processes responsible for the final outcome of low energy heavy ion collisions in terms of relevant features of the nuclear effective interaction and associated equation of state (EoS).
The mean-field approximation based on effective interactions or density functionals plays a pivotal role in the description of finite quantum many-body systems that are too large to be treated by ab initio methods. Examples are strongly interacting atomic nuclei and mesoscopic condensed matter systems. In this approach, the linear Schrodinger equation for the exact many-body wave function is mapped onto a non-linear density-dependent one-body potential problem. This approximation, not only provides computationally very simple solutions even for systems with many particles, but due to the non-linearity, it also allows for obtaining solutions that break essential symmetries of the system, often connected with phase transitions. However, mean-field approach suffers from the drawback that the corresponding wave functions do not have sharp quantum numbers and, therefore, many results cannot be compared directly with experimental data. In this article, we discuss general group theoretical techniques to restore the broken symmetries, and provide detailed expressions on the restoration of translational, rotational, spin, isospin, parity and gauge symmetries. In order to avoid the numerical complexity of exact projection techniques, various approximation methods available in the literature are examined. We present applications of the projection methods to simple nuclear models, realistic calculations in relatively small configuration spaces, nuclear energy density functional theory, as well as in other mesoscopic systems. We also discuss applications of projection techniques to quantum statistics in order to treat the averaging over restricted ensembles with fixed quantum numbers. Further, unresolved problems in the application of the symmetry restoration methods to the energy density functional theories are highlighted.
The halo factor is one of the experimental data which describes a distribution of neutrons in nuclear periphery. In the presented paper we use Skyrme-Hartree (SH) and the Relativistic Mean Field (RMF) models and we calculate the neutron excess factor $Delta_B$ defined in the paper which differs slightly from halo factor $f_{rm exp}$. The results of the calculations are compared to the measured data.
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