Abstract

The nucleon self-energies of 40Ca, 48Ca, and 208Pb are determined using anonlocal dispersive optical model (DOM). By enforcing the dispersion relationconnecting the real and imaginary part of the self-energy, both experimentalscattering data and nuclear structure data are used to constrain theseself-energies. The ability to calculate both bound and scattering statessimultaneously puts these self-energies in a unique position to consistentlydescribe exclusive knockout reactions such as (e,e'p). Using thewell-constrained self-energy describing 40Ca, the distorted-wave impulseapproximation (DWIA) description of the (e,e'p) reaction is shown to be validfor outgoing proton kinetic energies around 100 MeV. This analysis also revealsthe importance of high-energy proton reaction cross section data inconstraining spectroscopic factors of the (e,e'p) reactions. In particular, itis imperative that high-energy proton reaction cross section data are measuredfor 48Ca in the near future so that the quenching of the spectroscopic factorin the 48Ca(e,e'p)47K reaction can be properly constrained using the DOM.Moreover, DOM generated spectral functions indicate that the quenching ofspectroscopic factors is due not only to long-range correlations, but alsopartly due to the increase in the proton high-momentum content in 48Ca onaccount of the strong neutron-proton interaction. Single-particle momentumdistributions of protons and neutrons in 48Ca and 208Pb calculated from thesespectral functions confirm this by clearly showing that neutron excess causes ahigher fraction of high-momentum protons than neutrons. In addition to protonreaction cross section data, high-energy neutron total cross section data arealso shown to constrain the distribution of neutrons in these nuclei, leadingto the prediction of thick neutron skins in both 48Ca and 208Pb. Using the DOMspectral functions, the binding energy density of each nucleus is calculated.These energy densities call into question the degree to which the equation ofstate for nuclear matter is constrained by the well-known empirical massformula.

Committee Chair

Willem H. Dickhoff

Committee Members

Mark Alford, Lee Sobotka, Robert Charity, Saori Pastore,

Comments

Permanent URL: https://doi.org/10.7936/en1m-vp71

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Author's Department

Physics

Author's School

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

Spring 5-15-2019

Language

English (en)

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