Reduction of spectroscopic overlap across the Z = 8 shell in neutron-rich nuclei
The recent discovery and spectroscopic measurements of 27 O and 28 O suggests the disappearance of the N = 20 shell structure in these neutron-rich oxygen isotopes. We measured one- and two-proton removal cross sections from 27 F and 29 N, respectively, extracting spectroscopic factors and comparing them to shell model overlap functions coupled with eikonal reaction model calculations. The invariant mass technique was used to reconstruct the two-body ( 24 O + n) and three-body ( 24 O + 2n) decay energies from knockout reactions of 27 F (106.2 MeV/u) and 29 Ne (112.8 MeV/u) beams impinging on a 9 Be target. The one-proton removal from 27 F strongly populated the ground state of 26 O and the extracted cross section of $3.4^{+0.3}_{-1.5}$ mb agrees with eikonal model calculations that are normalized by the shell model spectroscopic factors and account for the systematic reduction factor observed for single nucleon removal reactions within the models used. For the two-proton removal reaction from 29 Ne an upper limit of 0.08 mb was extracted for populating states in 27 O decaying though the ground state of 26 O. The measured upper limit for the population of the ground state of 26 O in the two-proton removal reaction from 29 Ne indicates a significant difference in the underlying nuclear structure of 27 F and 29 Ne.