Session BA - Frontiers of Nuclear Structure.
INVITED session, Wednesday evening, October 17
Haku, Outrigger Wailea Resort
In rotational bands built on high-j single-particle orbitals in odd-odd nuclei having triaxial shapes, the angular momenta of the valence proton, the valence neutron, and the collective rotation tend to align along the perpendicular axes of the triaxial core. This occurs when the Fermi level is low within the proton (neutron) subshell, but high within the neutron (proton) subshell resulting in their angular momenta oriented along the short and long axes, respectively. The core angular momentum is oriented along the intermediate axis because it has the largest moment of inertia according to the model of irrotational flow. These three mutually perpendicular vectors can be arranged to form two systems which differ by intrinsic chirality, a left- and a right-handed system; the two systems cannot be transformed into each other by rotation or space inversion, but are related by an operator, which involves time reversal. Chirality resulting from orthogonal coupling of angular momenta is unique to rotational bands in atomic nuclei since these are the only systems where a significant part of the total spin results from single-particle contributions. In relation to time reversal, chirality is a novel example of spontaneous symmetry breaking, on the same level as octupole deformation in relation to space inversion. The main experimental fingerprint of chirality in nuclear rotation is the doubling of states in rotational bands. \Delta I=1 doublet-band structures with remarkably similar experimental characteristics, recently observed for N=75 and N=73 isotones in the A\sim130 region, have been interpreted as chiral-band partners built on the \pih_11/2\nuh_11/2 configuration. Additional transition rate information is being investigated both experimentally and theoretically. The description of the chiral partner bands based on the microscopic Tilted Axis Cranking approach in the intrinsic, body-fixed reference frame and phenomenological core-particle coupling in the laboratory reference frame will be discussed.