Theses and Dissertations

Issuing Body

Mississippi State University

Advisor

Rupak, Gautam

Committee Member

Dutta, Dipangkar

Committee Member

Arnoldus, Hendrik F.

Committee Member

Dunne, James A.

Committee Member

Yarahmadian, Shantia

Date of Degree

8-11-2017

Document Type

Dissertation - Open Access

Major

Physics

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D)

College

College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Department of Physics and Astronomy

Abstract

In this thesis, we study low energy capture reactions and neutron-deuteron elastic scattering using halo effective field theory (EFT). At low energy, EFT provides a general framework to analyze physical systems regarding as an expansion of short-distance over large distance scales. We provide a model-independent calculation for neutron capture on carbon-14, radiative capture of 3He-4He, radiative capture of 3H-4He, and neutrondeuteron (n-d) doublet channel elastic scattering using halo EFT. These reactions play a significant role in the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen (CNO) cycle, solar neutrino flux measurement, lithium production, and big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) in the early universe. The cross section is calculated for radiative neutron capture in carbon-14 using halo EFT. This reaction is slowest in the CNO cycle, and it acts as a bottleneck in the production of heavier nuclei A greater than 14. The capture contribution is different from Brett-Wigner resonance because of interference between resonant and non-resonant contribution. Also, we calculated, electromagnetic form factors for one-neutron halo nuclei such as carbon-15, beryllium-11, and carbon-19 using EFT. The electromagnetic form factors depend on the nucleon separation energy, effective range, and the two-body current. The EFT expressions are presented to leading order (LO) for 15C and next-to-leading order (NLO) for 11Be and 19C. We also calculated astronomical Sactor for 3He-4He and 3H-4He radiative capture reactions. The low energy Sactor for these reactions are important to understand the Li problem and neutrino physics. At the LO, the capture amplitude contains the initial state swave strong and Coulomb interactions summed to all orders. The NLO contribution comes from non-perturbative Coulomb interaction. Our calculated astrophysical Sactor for 3He- 4He is slightly above the average compared to the other measurement and prediction but consistent within current error bars. The Sactor for 3H-4He is also compatible with the experimental extrapolation. Finally, we studied doublet channel n-d scattering using halo EFT. A two dimer halo EFT is developed to describe the virtual state and three-body bound state in n-d scattering. We show the connection between virtual state and three-body bound state using S-matrix analysis and phase shift analysis which is supported by the Efimov plots.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11668/20964

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