The recent discovery and spectroscopic measurements ofandsuggests the disappearance of theshell structure in these neutron-rich oxygen isotopes.
We measured one- and two-proton removal cross sections fromand, respectively, extracting spectroscopic factors and comparing them to shell model overlap functions coupled with eikonal reaction model calculations.
The invariant mass technique was used to reconstruct the two-body () and three-body () decay energies from knockout reactions of(106.2 MeV/u) and(112.8 MeV/u) beams impinging on atarget.
The one-proton removal fromstrongly populated the ground state ofand the extracted cross section ofmb agrees with eikonal model calculations that are normalized by the shell model spectroscopic factors and account for the systematic reduction factor observed for single nucleon removal reactions within the models used. For the two-proton removal reaction froman upper limit of 0.08 mb was extracted for populating states indecaying though the ground state of.
The measured upper limit for the population of the ground state ofin the two-proton removal reaction fromindicates a significant difference in the underlying nuclear structure ofand.