Revealing the short-range structure of the "mirror nuclei" $^3$H and $^3$He
Creators: name: Li, S.
name: Cruz-Torres, R.
name: Santiesteban, N.
name: Ye, Z. H.
name: Abrams, D.
name: Alsalmi, S.
name: Androic, D.
name: Aniol, K.
name: Arrington, J.
name: Averett, T.
name: Gayoso, C. Ayerbe
name: Bane, J.
name: Barcus, S.
name: Barrow, J.
name: Beck, A.
name: Bellini, V.
name: Bhatt, H.
name: Bhetuwal, D.
name: Biswas, D.
name: Bulumulla, D.
name: Camsonne, A.
name: Castellanos, J.
name: Chen, J.
name: Chen, J-P.
name: Chrisman, D.
name: Christy, M. E.
name: Clarke, C.
name: Covrig, S.
name: Craycraft, K.
name: Day, D.
name: Dutta, D.
name: Fuchey, E.
name: Gal, C.
name: Garibaldi, F.
name: Gautam, T. N.
name: Gogami, T.
name: Gomez, J.
name: Guèye, P.
name: Habarakada, A.
name: Hague, T. J.
name: Hansen, J. O.
name: Hauenstein, F.
name: Henry, W.
name: Higinbotham, D. W.
name: Holt, R. J.
name: Hyde, C.
name: Itabashi, T.
name: Kaneta, M.
name: Karki, A.
name: Katramatou, A. T.
name: Keppel, C. E.
name: Khachatryan, M.
name: Khachatryan, V.
name: King, P. M.
name: Korover, I.
name: Kurbany, L.
name: Kutz, T.
name: Lashley-Colthirst, N.
name: Li, W. B.
name: Liu, H.
name: Liyanage, N.
name: Long, E.
name: Mammei, J.
name: Markowitz, P.
name: McClellan, R. E.
name: Meddi, F.
name: Meekins, D.
name: Beck, S. Mey-Tal
name: Michaels, R.
name: Mihovilovič, M.
name: Moyer, A.
name: Nagao, S.
name: Nelyubin, V.
name: Nguyen, D.
name: Nycz, M.
name: Olson, M.
name: Ou, L.
name: Owen, V.
name: Palatchi, C.
name: Pandey, B.
name: Papadopoulou, A.
name: Park, S.
name: Paul, S.
name: Petkovic, T.
name: Pomatsalyuk, R.
name: Premathilake, S.
name: Punjabi, V.
name: Ransome, R. D.
name: Reimer, P. E.
name: Reinhold, J.
name: Riordan, S.
name: Roche, J.
name: Rodriguez, V. M.
name: Schmidt, A.
name: Schmookler, B.
name: Segarra, E. P.
name: Shahinyan, A.
name: Slifer, K.
name: Solvignon, P.
name: Širca, S.
name: Su, T.
name: Suleiman, R.
name: Szumila-Vance, H.
name: Tang, L.
name: Tian, Y.
name: Tireman, W.
name: Tortorici, F.
name: Toyama, Y.
name: Uehara, K.
name: Urciuoli, G. M.
name: Votaw, D.
name: Williamson, J.
name: Wojtsekhowski, B.
name: Wood, S.
name: Zhang, J.
name: Zheng, X.
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Nuclear Experiment (nucl-ex)
subject: High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex)
subject: Nuclear Theory (nucl-th)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: When protons and neutrons (nucleons) are bound into atomic nuclei, they are close enough together to feel significant attraction, or repulsion, from the strong, short-distance part of the nucleon-nucleon interaction. These strong interactions lead to hard collisions between nucleons, generating pairs of highly-energetic nucleons referred to as short-range correlations (SRCs). SRCs are an important but relatively poorly understood part of nuclear structure and mapping out the strength and isospin structure (neutron-proton vs proton-proton pairs) of these virtual excitations is thus critical input for modeling a range of nuclear, particle, and astrophysics measurements. Hitherto measurements used two-nucleon knockout or ``triple-coincidence'' reactions to measure the relative contribution of np- and pp-SRCs by knocking out a proton from the SRC and detecting its partner nucleon (proton or neutron). These measurementsshow that SRCs are almost exclusively np pairs, but had limited statistics and required large model-dependent final-state interaction (FSI) corrections. We report on the first measurement using inclusive scattering from the mirror nuclei $^3$H and $^3$He to extract the np/pp ratio of SRCs in the A=3 system. We obtain a measure of the np/pp SRC ratio that is an order of magnitude more precise than previous experiments, and find a dramatic deviation from the near-total np dominance observed in heavy nuclei. This result implies an unexpected structure in the high-momentum wavefunction for $^3$He and $^3$H. Understanding these results will improve our understanding of the short-range part of the N-N interaction.