Experimental evaluation of the nuclear neutron-proton contact


  Ronen Weiss[1]  ,  Betzalel Bazak[1]  ,  Nir Barnea[1]  
[1] The Racah Institute of Physics, The hebrew university

The nuclear neutron-proton contact is introduced, generalizing Tan's work, and evaluated from medium energy nuclear photodisintegration experiments. To this end we reformulate the quasi-deuteron model of nuclear photodisintegration and establish the bridge between the Levinger constant and the contact. Using experimental evaluations of Levinger's constant we extract the value of the neutron-proton contact in finite nuclei and in symmetric nuclear matter. Assuming isospin symmetry we propose to evaluate the neutron-neutron contact through measurement of photonuclear spin correlated neutron-proton pairs.