A unified description of the halo nucleus ³⁷Mg from microscopic structure to reaction observables

Based on the structure input directly from the deformed relativistic Hartree-Bogoliubov theory in continuum (DRHBc), we fully study reaction observables to search for halo evidence of ³⁷Mg with the Glauber model. In this scheme, we evaluate the reaction cross sections of ^20–37Mg bombarding a C target at 240 MeV/nucleon and find that most of the results agree well with the experimental data within 1σ uncertainty, especially good for the case of ³⁷Mg. Our predicted doubling of the cross section change from ³⁶Mg to ³⁷Mg over that from ³⁴Mg to ³⁵Mg is consistent with a halo structure in ³⁷Mg. Additionally, our calculated narrow longitudinal momentum distribution of ³⁶Mg residues from ³⁷Mg + ¹²C breakup agrees well with data and imply a nuclear size much larger than ³⁵Mg. Furthermore, our study shows a dominant p-wave contribution to the longitudinal momentum distribution, supporting the conclusion that ³⁷Mg is a p-wave halo nucleus. Our study provides the first unified description of the halo characteristics of ³⁷Mg from nuclear structure to reaction dynamics.