High-Energy Reactions and the Evidence for Correlations in the Nuclear Ground-State Wave Function

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
High-energy nuclear reactions which depend strongly on nucleon position correlations in the nuclear ground state are analyzed and shown to give evidence for the existence of marked correlation effects. The following high-energy experiments are considered: nuclear photoeffect, meson absorption in nuclei, deuteron pickup, proton-proton scattering in a nucleus, and meson production in proton-nucleus collisions. The corresponding cross sections depend on a nucleon momentum distribution which can be represented at high energies by a single function giving reasonable agreement with all the experiments considered. This momomentum distribution differs substantially from that for the shell model of the nucleus and thus provides strong evidence for correlation in the nuclear ground-state wave function.