Information content of a new observable: The case of the nuclear neutron skin

By Paul-Gerhard Reinhard, Witold Nazarewicz. 2010

205 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We address two questions pertaining to the uniqueness and usefulness of a new observable: (i) Considering the current theoretical knowledge, what novel information does new measurement bring in? (ii) How can new data reduce uncertainties of current theoretical models? We illustrate these points by studying the radius of the neutron distribution of a heavy nucleus, a quantity related to the equation of state for neutron matter that determines properties of nuclei and neutron stars. By systematically varying the parameters of two theoretical models and studying the resulting confidence ellipsoid, we quantify the relationships between the neutron skin and various properties of finite nuclei and infinite nuclear matter. Using the covariance analysis, we identify observables and pseudo-observables that correlate, and do not correlate, with the neutron skin. By adding the information on the neutron radius to the pool of observables determining the energy functional, we show how precise experimental determination of the neutron radius in $^{208}\mathrm{Pb}$ would reduce theoretical uncertainties on the neutron matter equation of state.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Radiation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c6fbf2c652aacadd4752a35ced90eb325d21825b

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Citations in the corpus

The Nuclear Symmetry Energy (2016, methodology): “[56, 57] on the basis of a covariance analysis of the correlations.”
Error Estimates of Theoretical Models: a Guide (2014, background): “9), neutron skins and dipole polarizability [35, 36, 37], nucleon densities [12], weak-charge form factor [11], and neutron matter equation of state [8, 38, 24, 39, 40, 41, 42, 28].”
Future of nuclear fission theory (2020, result): “They allow a sensitivity analysis to check the impact of a certain model parameter on an observable (Kortelainen et al 2010, Kortelainen et al 2012) and they indicate the information content of a new observable as compared to previous ones (Reinhard and Nazarewicz 2010, McDonnell et al 2015).”