Hard Probes Of Short Range Nucleon Nucleon Correlations

Download or read book Hard Probes of Short-range Nucleon-nucleon Correlations written by and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The strong interaction of nucleons at short distances leads to a high-momentum component to the nuclear wave function, associated with short-range correlations between nucleons. These short-range, high-momentum structures in nuclei are one of the least well understood aspects of nuclear matter, relating to strength outside of the typical mean-field approaches to calculating the structure of nuclei. While it is difficult to study these short-range components, significant progress has been made over the last decade in determining how to cleanly isolate short-range correlations in nuclei. We have moved from asking if such structures exist, to mapping out their strength in nuclei and studying their microscopic structure. A combination of several different measurements, made possible by high-luminosity and high-energy accelerators, coupled with an improved understanding of the reaction mechanism issues involved in studying these structures, has led to significant progress, and provided significant new information on the nature of these small, highly-excited structures in nuclei. We review the general issues related to short-range correlations, survey recent experiments aimed at probing these short-range structures, and lay out future possibilities to further these studies.