Khlood Alharthi
About
My research project
Mean-field methods in nuclear structure and reactionsThis project will make use of self-consistent mean-field (“Hartree-Fock”) based methods to calculate recent experimental results in nuclear structure and reaction studies. By doing so, the validity of the methods will be explored, as well as giving a physical description to interpret recent experimental results. Examples will include giant resonance states, low-lying excitations, isomers and ground state properties. Examples of cases of interest include recent studies on the giant monopole resonance in molybdenum-100 showing indication of triaxiality, and the low-lying octupole strength near lead-208, which is at odds with existing theoretical descriptions.
Supervisors
This project will make use of self-consistent mean-field (“Hartree-Fock”) based methods to calculate recent experimental results in nuclear structure and reaction studies. By doing so, the validity of the methods will be explored, as well as giving a physical description to interpret recent experimental results. Examples will include giant resonance states, low-lying excitations, isomers and ground state properties. Examples of cases of interest include recent studies on the giant monopole resonance in molybdenum-100 showing indication of triaxiality, and the low-lying octupole strength near lead-208, which is at odds with existing theoretical descriptions.
Publications
Octupole excitations of atomic nuclei can be viewed as fluctuations around an equilibrium shape. Shape fluctuations cause a change in the nuclear surface, and it is reasonable to suggest that such fluctuations may probe the nuclear surface energy. We use a series of Skyrme interactions, which were fitted to provide a systematic range of surface energies, to explore the surface energy dependence of octupole excitations in 208 Pb. We find a strong positive linear correlation between the surface energy of a Skyrme interaction and its prediction of the first 3 − octupole excitation energy.