The observation of long-range three-body Coloumb effects in the decay of 16Ne

Abstract

The interaction of an $E/A$=57.6-MeV ${}^{17}$Ne beam with a Be target was used to populate levels in ${}^{16}$Ne following neutron knockout reactions. The decay of ${}^{16}$Ne states into the three-body ${}^{14}$O+$p$+$p$ continuum was observed in the High Resolution Array (HiRA). For the first time for a 2p emitter, correlations between the momenta of the three decay products were measured with sufficient resolution and statistics to allow for an unambiguous demonstration of their dependence on the long-range nature of the Coulomb interaction. Contrary to previous experiments, the intrinsic decay width of the ${}^{16}$Ne ground state was found to be narrow ($\Gamma <60$~keV), consistent with theoretical estimates.

Comments: 6 pages, 5 figures