Sensitivity of one-neutron knockout observables of loosely- to more deeply-bound nuclei

For the last few decades, one-nucleon knockout reactions on light composite targets— 9 Be or 12 C—have been extensively used to study the single-particle (s.p.) structure of nuclei far from stability. To determine which information can be accurately inferred from knockout cross sections, we conduct a sensitivity analysis of these observables considering various s.p. descriptions within the usual eikonal description of the reaction. This work shows that total one-neutron knockout cross sections are not sensitive to the short-range part of the s.p. wave function. Rather, they scale with the mean square radius of the overlap function. Using a perturbative expression of the cross section, we can easily explain our numerical predictions analytically. This analysis suggests that (i) spectroscopic factors extracted from knockout data suffer from sizeable model uncertainties associated with the choice of s.p. wave functions and (ii) knockout reactions constitute an excellent probe of the radius of the nucleus and therefore offer an alternative technique to infer the neutron-skin thickness of exotic nuclei.