Ab initio informed 20Ne(p, pα)16O reaction elucidates the emergence of alpha clustering from chiral potentials

We report on the first ab initio informed α knock-out reaction in the intermediate-mass region, with the aim to probe the underlying chiral potential and its impact on the emergence of alpha clustering in this mass region. The theoretical predictions of the $\alpha {+}^{16}$O clustering in the ²⁰Ne ground state, based on the ab initio symmetry-adapted no-core shell model with continuum, yield a triple differential cross section for ²⁰Ne(p, pα)¹⁶O that is in a remarkable agreement with the data. This allows us to examine predictions of surface and in-medium α-cluster features that emerge from the underlying realistic nucleon-nucleon interaction with no parameters fitted to nuclear data beyond the two-body system, and to compare these to the successful antisymmetrized molecular dynamics approach.