Two neutron decay of 16Be

Abstract

Recently, the first example of two-neutron decay from the ground state of an unbound nucleus, ${}^{16}$Be, was seen. Three-body methods are ideal for exactly treating the degrees of freedom important for these decays. Using a basis expansion over hyperspherical harmonics and the hyperspherical R-matrix method, we construct a realistic model of ${}^{16}$Be in order to investigate its decay mode and the role of the two-neutron interaction. The neutron-${}^{14}$Be interaction is constrained using shell model predictions. We obtain a ground state for ${}^{16}$Be that is over-bound by approximately 1 MeV with a width of approximately 0.23 MeV. This suggests, that for such systems, the three-body force needs to be repulsive.

Comments: 4 pages, 1 figure, contribution to the proceedings for the 21st International Conference on Few Body Problems in Physics, Chicago, Illinois, USA