Speaker
Description
Rare Isotopes located far from the valley of stability bring new insight into
the evolution nuclear structure. Our knowledge on the properties of neutronand
proton-rich nuclei guide our understanding of the state of matter in
extreme neutron-rich systems such as neutron stars and supernovae and
heavy element synthesis. The presentation will outline how radioactive (RI)
beams are allowing us to uncover the unknown properties of rare isotopes
and leading to revelation of unconventional forms of nuclei such as, nuclear
halo and skin structures and fundamental changes of nuclear shells that
break the bounds of our traditional knowledge. The discussion will show
examples of how low-energy re-accelerated RI beams from the Isotope
Separator Online (ISOL) facility at TRIUMF are used to study Borromean
nuclei at the drip-lines to uncover features of soft dipole resonance in the
halo nucleus, 11Li and unbound excited states in other light Borromean
nuclei.
The new features of the rare isotopes challenge our understanding of the
nuclear force bringing new insight. It has been a century-long challenge to
understand the nuclear force between protons and neutrons forming manybody
nuclei, from the fundamental basis of quantum chromodynamics
(QCD). The formulation of the chiral effective field theory has paved the
closest link with QCD making it possible to predict some observable
properties of many-body nuclei. The presentation will show selected
examples from recent achievements of how observations with rare isotopes
compare with ab initio theoretical predictions with chiral forces
demonstrating high sensitivity to refine our understanding of the nuclear
interaction.
