Nuclear structure seen through ground-state properties of exotic nuclei

17 Oct 2011, 08:00 → 21 Oct 2011, 18:00 Europe/Zurich

ECT*, Trento, Italy

 The knowledge of the ground-state properties of nuclei has contributed vastly to our understanding of the underlying nuclear structure. The masses, radii, spins, and moments of radionuclides allow us to investigate nuclear structure far from stability. The beauty of these observables lies in the facts that they are simple and can be extracted in a model independent way. They also can be measured over wide ranges of nuclei, including complete isotopic chains. They bring insight into many nuclear-physics questions such as the shell structure of exotic nuclei, deformation effects, importance of three-body and tensor forces, or the existence of an island of superheavy elements. In addition, they prove crucial in testing current theoretical descriptions of nuclei, as well as verifying their predictive power.
 
The ground-state properties of exotic nuclei can be determined with various – usually atomic-physics based – techniques including ion and atom traps and lasers. These studies require a beam with a small energy spread for efficient trapping and for narrow line width of resonances. Therefore, until recently they have been limited to ISOL-type facilities, with ISOLDE at CERN pioneering many of the methods. However, recent technical developments and facility upgrades have led to the extension of the above methods to a wider range of radioactive-beam facilities, including the in-flight ones, which have provided a lot of new data. New facilities such as the HIE-ISOLDE, SPIRAL-2, TRIUMF, RIKEN, FAIR, and FRIB are all planning to enter the game of ground-state property measurements and are expected to provide a wealth of results. This should give us unique possibilities to push the limits of our knowledge of ground-state properties of nuclei much further away from stability.
 
At this point it is crucial that the growing amount of experimental results be matched by ever more accurate theoretical descriptions and interpretations. For this reason this workshop will bring together the experimentalists and theorists addressing the ground-state properties of nuclei. The first aim is to overview the contribution of ground-state observables to our present understanding of the nuclear structure, and to review how our experimental knowledge is reflected in theoretical descriptions. For this, we intend to discuss recent key experimental results as well as the current status of theoretical approaches, and the paths for their improvement. The second aim is to formulate concrete proposals for possible future measurements, based on requests from the theory side and taking into account the progress in experimental techniques and access to new facilities.