Effects of Coulomb and isospin symmetry breaking interactions on neutron-skin thickness

Abstract

Both the Coulomb interaction and isospin symmetry breaking (ISB) parts of the nuclear interaction break the isospin symmetry in atomic nuclei. Effects of these two kinds of interaction on properties of atomic nuclei, especially the mass difference of mirror nuclei and the neutron-skin thickness of = and ≠ nuclei, are discussed. It is found that corrections to the Hartree-Fock-Slater approximation for the Coulomb interaction negligibly affect the neutron-skin thickness, while the charge-symmetry breaking term originating from the strong interaction might affect it non-negligibly. According to our calculations, the ISB terms other than the Coulomb interaction affect the estimation of the density dependence of the symmetry energy, , by about 0–12MeV using the correlation with the neutron-skin thickness.