Nuclear chiral and magnetic rotation in covariant density functional theory

Abstract

Excitations of chiral rotation observed in triaxial nuclei and magnetic and/or antimagnetic rotations seen in near-spherical nuclei have attracted a lot of attention. Unlike conventional rotation in well-deformed or superdeformed nuclei, here the rotational axis is not necessary coinciding with any principal axis of the nuclear density distribution. Thus, tilted axis cranking is mandatory to describe these excitations self-consistently in the framework of covariant density functional theory (CDFT). We will briefly introduce the formalism of tilted axis cranking CDFT and its application for magnetic and antimagnetic rotation phenomena. Configuration-fixed CDFT and its predictions for nuclear chiral configurations and for favorable triaxial deformation parameters are also presented, and the discoveries of the multiple chiral doublets (M\c{hi}D) in 133Ce and 103Rh are discussed.

21 pages, 19 figures, an invited comment to Physica Scripta to the Focus Issue on Nuclear Structure: Celebrating the 75 Nobel Prize, in press