Mirror-skin thickness: a possible observable sensitive to the charge symmetry breaking energy density functional

Abstract

We propose a new observable, named the mirror-skin thickness, in order to extract the strength of the charge symmetry breaking (CSB) term in an energy density functional (EDF). The mirror-skin thickness of \( N = 20 \) isotones and \( Z = 20 \) isotopes is studied by using Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov (HFB) calculations with various Skyrme EDFs and adding CSB and charge independence breaking (CIB) terms. It is shown that the mirror-skin thickness is sensitive only to the CSB EDF, but hardly depends on either the isospin symmetric part of the nuclear EDF or the CIB term. Therefore, this observable can be used to extract the magnitude of the CSB term in the EDF quantitatively, either from experimental data or ab initio calculations. We have studied the accuracy in the mirror-skin thickness that is needed to extract sensible information. Our study may also help to understand the inconsistency between the strength of the phenomenological CSB and that extracted from ab initio calculations [Naito et al. Nuovo. Cim. C 47, 52 (2024)]. Among possible mirror pairs for experimental study, we propose the mirror-skin thickness between \( {}^{42} \textrm{Ca} \) and \( {}^{42} \textrm{Ti} \), which could be accessed in future experiments in RIBF and/or FRIB.