I. Introduction
The existence of the neutron skin is a remarkable feature of neutron-rich nuclei. Because neutrons don’t bind, neutron excess, typically measured by the isospin asymmetry
, is a destabilizing effect in a nucleus. As a consequence, some of the excess neutrons are “pushed out" from the (neutron-enriched) core and form the skin. The same physics plays an important role in neutron stars, which are supported against gravitational collapse by the outward pressure existing in dense systems with high neutron concentration. Studies of nuclear interactions in systems with high or extreme neutron to proton ratio are crucial for understanding the neutron driplines, the location of which is not well known. The new Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), operational since May 2022, is expected to increase the number of known rare isotopes from 3000 to about 6000 [
1].
The role of microscopic nuclear physics is to predict observables based on fundamental nuclear forces derived from first principles. Comparison with measurements is then a true test of the predictive power of the theory. The neutron skin is not a “conventional" observable, in that it’s not measured directly. Instead, it is extracted from measurements of observables that are sensitive to the neutron density distribution in nuclei. Naturally, the neutron density cannot be probed with electron scattering the way it’s done for proton densities, and so different methods must be employed, such as experiments with hadronic probes or measurements which exploit the neutron weak charge. Those will be reviewed in Section II.
We recall that the neutron skin is defined as
that is, the difference between the root mean square radii of the neutron and the proton distributions.
The common goal of experimentalists and theorists is to shed light on fundamental questions. In the case of neutron skins, the physics one wants to pin down concerns the aforementioned pressure that determines the spatial extension of the neutron skin, an information contained in the equation of state (EoS) of neutron-rich matter. The importance of this quantity cannot be overstated, given that its relevance extends from nuclei to compact astrophysical systems. These connections will be elucidated in Section III.
The purpose of this article is to review and critically examine modern predictions and empirical constraints as well as the different points of view currently being debated. A special focus is placed on the recently reported value of the neutron skin in
48Ca extracted from the CREX experiment [
3], relative to the findings from the PREX-II [
2] experiment. We end with thoughts and suggestions on the best way forward to strengthen the link between experiment and
ab initio theory.
III. The status of ab initio theory
A. Development of microscopic nuclear forces
Our still incomplete knowledge of nuclear forces is the result of decades of struggle. Currently, the optimal approach to the construction of nuclear forces is based on the understanding that the energy scale determines the appropriate degrees of freedom of the theory – the central concept to the development of chiral effective field theory (EFT) [
41,
42]. Here, we provide only a brief summary of the strongest features of chiral EFT.
Chiral EFT allows the development of nuclear interactions as an expansion where theoretical uncertainties can be assessed at each order. The organizational scheme that controls the expansion is known as “power counting." The crucial point is that chiral EFT maintains consistency with the underlying fundamental theory of strong interactions, quantum chromodynamics (QCD), through the symmetries and symmetry breaking mechanisms of the low-energy QCD Lagrangian. The first step towards the development of an EFT is the identification of a “soft scale” and a “hard scale," which is suggested by the hadron spectrum, observing the large separation between the mass of the pion and the mass of the vector meson
. It is therefore natural to identify the pion mass and the
mass (approximately 1 GeV) with the soft and the hard scale, respectively. Moreover, since quarks and gluons are ineffective degrees of freedom in the low-energy regime, pions and nucleons can be taken as the appropriate degrees of freedom of the EFT. Having identified pions and nucleons as the appropriate degrees of freedom of the EFT, one can proceed to construct the Lagrangian of the effective theory:
which is then expanded in terms of a natural parameter, identified with the ratio of the “soft scale” over the “hard scale,”
.
Q is of the order of the pion mass, whereas
is the energy scale of chiral symmetry breaking, approximately 1 GeV. The contributions to the effective Lagrangian are arranged according to the power counting scheme, with increasing order resulting in smaller terms. While the expansion itself is, of course, infinite, at each order we are assured that the number of terms is finite and the contributions well defined. The combination of meson-theoretic NN potentials augmented with selected 3NF is an outdated paradigm, from which it’s essentially impossible to estimate the theoretical uncertainty of a prediction.
With chiral EFT, there has been enormous progress in the understanding and development of few-nucleon forces. We are on the right path, but there is still much to accomplish. Convergence at N
3LO needs to be on more robust grounds. Furthermore, there are indications that specific components of the 3NF at N
4LO have the potential to solve some outstanding problems in microscopic nuclear structure [
43].
B. Neutron skin predictions
We show in
Table 2 recent predictions for the skins in
48Ca and in
208Pb. Some comments are in place. In both Ref. [
37] and Ref. [
38], the nature of the NN chiral potentials, N
2LO
sat and
N
2LO
GO, is such that the results are not truly
ab initio. Note, also, that the value for
208Pb from Ref. [
38] is not a prediction, but was obtained using the linear regression the authors constructed from the skins of lighter nuclei.
Figure 3 shows the neutron skin in
48Ca
vs. the one in
208Pb. All values, except for the green bars, have been extracted from Figure 5 of Ref. [
3]. The PREX-II and PREX-I combined experimental result is shown by the blue bar, while the red vertical bar is the CREX result. The gray circles (pink diamonds) show results from a variety of relativistic (non-relativistic) density functionals, which give values of the
L parameter ranging from small and negative to large and positive. Coupled cluster (CC) [
37,
38] and dispersive optical model (DOM) predictions [
39] are also displayed. Our predictions are shown by the green bars [
40]. There exist, of course, relativistic mean-field (RMF) models that agree with the PREX result, and, correspondingly, generate values for
48Ca that are also on the larger side.
We conclude that a value between 0.212 fm and 0.354 fm (0.283 ± 0.071) for the skin of
208Pb is outside the boundaries set by microscopic theory. Simultaneous consistency with both CREX and PREX seems to be a challenge even for phenomenology. On the other hand, PREX aside, a small skin for
48Ca does not appear to be peculiar based on the facts we reviewed above, see also
Figure 1.
IV. Further Discussion
Irrespective of the inconsistency between PREX and CREX, there are far-reaching questions one must consider with regard to a thick skin in 208Pb and its ramifications.
A. Direct Urca processes
We define the total energy per baryon in
-equilibrated matter (in absence of muons) as
where
is the proton fractions. The last term accounts for the baryon rest masses (in units of energy), while
is the electron energy. The particle fractions are
and the chemical potentials are given by:
Naturally, we impose the constraints of fixed baryon density, Equation (
17), and global charge neutrality, Equation (
18):
The electron energy is easily written as
and thus
Noting that
and using Equations (
14) and (
21), we obtain:
where we have neglected the mass difference between the proton and the neutron.
If
is the density at which
is equal to the value needed for direct Urca processes (DU), about
, the following relation holds:
This simple relation can be quite insightful. If, for example,
is close to saturation density, the symmetry energy would be over 50 MeV at that point. If
, the symmetry energy at that density would be over 40 MeV. In microscopic predictions, DU processes are more likely to open at a few to several times normal density (based on projections, since chiral EFT predictions cannot be extended to such high densities). Using PREX II constraints, the Urca threshold is found to be approximately 1.5
or just above 0.2
[
45]. From Equation (
23), the value of the symmetry energy at 1.5
is then about 58 MeV, clearly indicationg an unusually steep density dependence, taking the PREX II value of 38.1 ± 4.7 MeV at saturation.
In Ref. [
45], the authors develop different parametrizations of RMF models constrained by CREX results, PREX II results, or a combination of both, and report that the direct Urca threshold density decreases from 0.71 fm
−3 to 0.21 fm
−3 as the skin of
208Pb increases from 0.13 fm to 0.28 fm, with expected implication for cooling processes. To the best of our knowledge, there is no evidence for rapid neutrino cooling
via direct Urca for low-mass (low central density) neutron stars. In fact, from analyses including luminosities and ages determined from observations of isolated neutron stars [
46], one may conclude that the direct Urca process, although possible at the central densities of neutron stars with masses between 1.7 and 2.0 solar masses, is unlikely around
, and is likely, but not the principal cooling mechanism, for the
stars.
B. Impact of the isovector component of the free-space nuclear force
The importance of a realistic isovector component of the nuclear force (that is, carefully calibrated through free-space NN data), on the density dependence of the symmetry energy has been demonstrated [
44,
47]. Relaxing the constraint of accurate phase shifts for the isospin-1
S and
P waves leads to drastic variations of the pressure in NM [
47] and, consequently, the neutron skin.
For the purpose of the present discussion, it’s useful to recall that, typically, the isovector sector of RMF functionals includes coupling of the nucleon to the isovector
-meson and a nonlinear
isoscalar-isovector cross-coupling term. In the models of Ref. [
48], designed to reconcile the PREX and CREX results, the novel feature is the inclusion of the scalar isovector
-meson (better known as the
-meson). The isospin splitting resulting from the isovector nature of the new contribution opens an additional fitting degree of freedom [
48].
As mesons heavier than the pion do not enter the development of the nucleon-nucleon (NN) force in chiral EFT, we will discuss this important point from the perspective of quantitative one-boson-exchange potentials (OBEP), as we already did over 10 years ago [
49]. Studies of the
and
contributions to the potential part of the symmetry energy in quantum hydrodynamics (QHD) models can be found in Refs. [30-35] of Ref. [
48], where those contributions are shown to be opposite in sign and very large in magnitude around normal density. Thus, in QHD-inspired models, the interplay between
and
is treated as the equivalent, in the isovector channel, of the interplay between
and
in the isoscalar channel. In contrast, the role of the
-meson in meson theory is subtle (although important) and it’s seen in the difference of its contributions to isospin-1 or isospin-0 partial waves, particularly
1S
0 and
3S
1. The dramatic difference between the description of the isovector channel in QHD-based models or realistic meson models on originate from several sources, including the absence of the pion in QHD, and the fact that meson contributions in a microscopic approach are iterated, and thus reduced by Pauli blocking.
In Ref. [
49], we have shown the difference between the potential energy contributions to NM and SNM from the isovector mesons, to estimate the effect of each meson on the potential energy part of the symmetry energy. The impact of the pion on the symmetry energy is by far the largest. On the other hand, mean-field theories are generally pionless, because the bulk of the attraction-repulsion balance needed for a realistic description of nuclear matter can be technically obtained from
and
only, an observation that is at the very foundation of the Walecka model [
50]. On the other hand, in any theory of nuclear forces, the pion is the most important ingredient. Chiral symmetry is spontaneously broken in low-energy QCD and the pion emerges as the Goldstone boson of this symmetry breaking. Moreover, NN scattering data, and most definitely the deuteron, cannot be described without the pion.
In conclusion, developing additional density functionals with unrealistic isovector contributions for the purpose of reconciling the parity-violating experiments does not provide more clarity. The road to understanding the behavior of dense neutron-rich matter must go through ab initio nuclear forces.
V. Conclusions
The above has been a critical analysis of the available facts on the neutron skins in 208Pb and 48Ca, from both the experimental and the theoretical side.
We have pointed out and discussed problematic aspects that arise in conjunction with a stiff EoS and the corresponding thick skin in 208Pb. We emphasized that such thick skin is outside the boundaries of ab initio nuclear theory.
On the other hand, in the context of existing measurements and microscopic predictions, the CREX result for the skin of 48Ca does not appear to be an outlier.
We wait with excitement for the MREX experiment at the MESA accelerator, which promises to measure the neutron skin of
208Pb with
ultimate precision [
51].
Laboratory neutron skin measurements have important implications for neutron star properties, such as radius, tidal deformability, and cooling processes, and are complementary to astronomical observations. In the “multi-messanger" era, it is especially important to keep a broad view and, at the same time, stay in close touch with first principles, as we study the remarkable connection between microscopic physics and “telescope physics" enabled by the equation of state.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, under Award Number DE-FG02-03ER41270.
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