Role of triaxiality in deformed halo nuclei

Abstract

It is known that nuclear deformation plays an important role in inducing the halo structure in neutron-rich nuclei by mixing several angular momentum components. While previous theoretical studies on this problem in the literature assume axially symmetric deformation, we here consider non-axially symmetric deformations. With triaxial deformation, the $\Omega$ quantum number is admixed in a single-particle wave function, where $\Omega$ is the projection of the single-particle angular momentum on the symmetric axis, and the halo structure may arise even when it is absent with the axially symmetric deformation. In this way, the area of halo nuclei may be extended when triaxial deformation is considered. We demonstrate this idea using a deformed Woods-Saxon potential for nuclei with neutron number N=13 and 43.