Isospin mixing and energy distributions in three-body decay

Abstract

The structure of the second 2+ resonance in 6Li is investigated with special emphasis on its isospin 0 components. The wave functions are computed in a three-body model (α + n + p) using the hyperspherical adiabatic expansion method combined with complex scaling. In the decay into three free particles the symmetry conserving short-range interaction dominates at short distance whereas the symmetry breaking Coulomb interaction dominates at intermediate and large distances resulting in substantial isospin mixing.We predict the mixing and the energy distributions of the fragments after decay. Computations are consistent with available experiments. We conjecture that nuclear three-body decays frequently produce such large isospin mixing at large distance where the energy distributions are determined.