Is nuclear structure relevant to non-mesonic hypernuclear weak decay?

Abstract

This work studies the relevance of nuclear structure in the nonmesonic weak decay of Λ-hypernuclei, with the mechanism of ΛN → NN transition being restricted to one pion exchange (OPE) only. As an application, for the hypernucleus Λ 12 C a comparison between the L-S coupling and the j-j coupling gives an estimate of the range of nuclear structure effects. A considerable dependence is found of the total decay rate and the ratio Г n /qG p on the single particle properties of nuclear models. The possible contribution from the ΔI = 3/2 channel is investigated in a phenomenological manner.