Occupation of shell model orbitals extracted from knockout reactions

Abstract

Abstract In recent years new facilities have been developed for quasifree knockout studies of unstable atomic nuclei. This has stimulated renewed interest in several unresolved issues from earlier work on stable targets. With selected examples the present paper provides a brief explanation to what extent results from the traditional investigations are reliable. As is known, current insight suggests a problem with the mean-field approximation to nuclear matter. To some extent this result is vulnerable to sensitivity to input ingredients of the theoretical model used to arrive at this conclusion. This review also implicitly provides some guidance in this respect.