Coincident neutrons from the
18O+26Mg${\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}^{44}$Ca (
Ex=60 and 71 MeV) compound-nuclear reaction show an anticorrelation at small relative momentum, giving evidence for quantum-statistical interference in analogy to the optical Hanbury-Brown and Twiss effect. An average decay width of 60 keV is extracted from the measured energy correlations. The deduced extension of the neutron wave packets exceeds by far the nn scattering length, in accordance with the observed insignificance of the attractive nn final-state interaction.
The formalism based on Correlated Basis Functions (CBF) and the cluster-expansion technique has been recently employed to derive an effective interaction from a realistic nuclear Hamiltonian. One of the main objectives of the work described in this Thesis is establishing the accuracy of this novel approach--that allows to combine the flexibility of perturbation theory in the basis of eigenstates of the noninteracting system with a realistic description of short-range correlations in coordinate space--by focusing on the hard-sphere fermion system. As a first application of the formalism, the quasiparticle properties of hard spheres of degeneracy four have been determined from the two-point Green's function. The calculation has been performed carrying out a perturbative expansion of the self-energy, up to the second order in the CBF effective interaction. The main results of this study are the momentum distributions, the quasiparticle spectra and their description in terms of effective mass. The investigation of the hard-sphere fermion fluid has been extended to study the shear viscosity and thermal conductivity coefficients of the system with degeneracy two, that can be regarded as a model of pure neutron matter. The resulting transport coefficients show a strong sensitivity to the quasiparticle effective mass, reflecting the effect of second order contributions to the self-energy which are not taken into account in nuclear matter studies available in the literature. The difference between first and second order results is likely to play an important role in astrophysical applications and needs to be carefully investigated extending our analysis to nuclear matter.
Recent calculations with an effective isospin-dependent contact interaction show the possibility of the crossover from superfluidity of neutron Cooper pairs in the
1S0 pairing channel to Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of di-neutron bound states in dilute nuclear matter. The density and spin correlation functions are calculated for a di-neutron condensate in asymmetric nuclear matter with the aim of finding the possible features of the BCS-BEC crossover. It is shown that the zero-momentum transfer spin correlation function satisfies the sum rule at zero temperature. In symmetric nuclear matter, the density correlation function changes sign at low momentum transfer across the BCS-BEC transition, and this feature can be considered as a signature of the crossover. At finite isospin asymmetry, this criterion gives too large a value for the critical asymmetry ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{c}^{d}~0.9$, at which the BEC state is quenched. Therefore, it can be trusted for the description of the density-driven BCS-BEC crossover of neutron pairs only at small isospin asymmetry. This result generalizes the conclusion of the study in Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 090402 (2005), where the change of sign of the density correlation function at low momentum transfer in two-component quantum fermionic atomic gas with the balanced populations of fermions of different species was considered as an unambiguous signature of the BCS-BEC transition.