Emergent geometry and duality in the carbon nucleus

ORAL

Abstract

The carbon atom provides the backbone for the complex organic chemistry composing the building blocks of life. The physics of the carbon nucleus in its predominant isotope, 12C, is similarly full of multifaceted complexity. Here we provide a model-independent density map of the geometry of the nuclear states of 12C using the ab initio framework of nuclear lattice effective field theory. We find that the well-known but enigmatic Hoyle state is composed of a “bent-arm” or obtuse triangular arrangement of alpha clusters. We identify all of the low lying nuclear states of 12C as having an intrinsic shape composed of three alpha clusters forming either an equilateral triangle or an obtuse triangle. The states with the equilateral triangle formation also have a dual description in terms of particle-hole excitations in the mean-field picture.

*We acknowledge funding by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) and the NSFC through the funds provided to the Sino-German Collaborative Research Center TRR110 "Symmetries and the Emergence of Structure in QCD" (DFG Project ID 196253076 - TRR 110, NSFC Grant No. 12070131001), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) President's International Fellowship Initiative (PIFI) (Grant No. 2018DM0034), the NSAF (Grant No. U1930403), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 12275259), Volkswagen Stiftung (Grant No. 93562), the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (ERC AdG EXOTIC, grant agreement No. 101018170) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DE-SC0013365 and DE-SC0021152) and the Nuclear Computational Low-Energy Initiative (NUCLEI) SciDAC-4 project (DE-SC0018083) as well as computational resources provided by the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing e.V. (www.gauss-centre.eu) for computing time on the GCS Supercomputer JUWELS at Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) and special GPU time allocated on JURECA-DC as well as the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility through the INCITE award "Ab-initio nuclear structure and nuclear reactions".

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Publication: Shen, Elhatisari, Lähde, Lee, Lu, Meißner, Nature Communications 14, 2777 (2023)

Presenters

  • Dean J Lee

    • Michigan State University

Authors

  • Dean J Lee

    • Michigan State University