Short-range correlations are an integral and important part in the full description of nuclear systems. Such correlations were studied extensively in the last few decades. Recently, a new and promising method for studying short-range correlations in ultra-cold atomic systems was introduced. In order to use this method in nuclear systems, significant changes must be made. The main goal of our work is to present these necessary changes and to use this new method, called the generalized nuclear contact formalism, in order to obtain new insights regarding short-range correlations in nuclei.

So far, significant progress was made towards this goal. We have adapted the contact formalism for nuclear systems and used it to describe nuclear quantities which are related to two-body short-range correlations. A new relation between the one-body and two-body momentum distributions was derived for high momentum and was verified using available numerical data. Additionally, Levinger's quasi-deuteron model for the nuclear photo-absorption cross section was rederived using the contact formalism. As a result, a surprising relation between the photo-absorption cross section and the nuclear momentum distributions was revealed and verified numerically. These results were published in a series of three papers [1-3].

For future work, the nuclear contact formalism can be used to understand many other properties of nuclear systems which are related to short-range correlations. For example, we propose to use this formalism to analyze the available electron scattering experiments, which are currently the main experimental tool for studying short-range correlations. We also plan to study three-body correlations in nuclear systems using the contact formalism.

References:

1. R. Weiss, B. Bazak, and N. Barnea, Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 012501 (2015).
2. R. Weiss, B. Bazak, and N. Barnea, Phys. Rev. C 92, 054311 (2015).
3. R. Weiss, B. Bazak, and N. Barnea, Eur. Phys. J. A 52, 92 (2016).