Angular structure of many-body correlations in atomic nuclei

Abstract There is growing evidence that high-energy scattering processes involving nuclei can offer unique insights into the many-body correlations present in nuclear ground states, in particular those of deformed nuclei. These processes involve, for instance, the collective anisotropic flows in heavy-ion collisions, or the diffractive production of vector mesons in photo-nuclear ( $$\gamma A$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>γ</mml:mi> <mml:mi>A</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> ) interactions. In this paper, we use a classical approximation and simple analytical models in order to exhibit characteristic and universal features of ground-state correlation functions that result from the presence of a deformed intrinsic state. In the case of a small axial quadrupole deformation, we show that the random rotation of the intrinsic density of the nucleus leads to a specific quadrupole modulation of the lab-frame two-body density as a function of the relative azimuthal angle. As a phenomenological, albeit academic application, we analyze the diffractive production of vector mesons in high-energy $$\gamma +^8$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>γ</mml:mi> <mml:msup> <mml:mo>+</mml:mo> <mml:mn>8</mml:mn> </mml:msup> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> Be collisions. This demonstrates with the simplest deformed nucleus how the two-body correlations impact the | t | dependence of the incoherent cross sections.