title: Nuclear deformation at finite temperature.
abstract: Deformation, a key concept in our understanding of heavy nuclei, is based on a mean-field description that breaks the rotational invariance of the nuclear many-body Hamiltonian. We present a method to analyze nuclear deformations at finite temperature in a framework that preserves rotational invariance. The auxiliary-field Monte Carlo method is used to generate a statistical ensemble and calculate the probability distribution associated with the quadrupole operator. Applying the technique to nuclei in the rare-earth region, we identify model-independent signatures of deformation and find that deformation effects persist to temperatures higher than the spherical-to-deformed shape phase-transition temperature of mean-field theory.
authors.affiliation: Center for Theoretical Physics, Sloane Physics Laboratory, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520, USA.
authors.forename: Y
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Alhassid
authors.affiliation: Center for Theoretical Physics, Sloane Physics Laboratory, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520, USA.
authors.forename: C N
authors.initials: CN
authors.lastname: Gilbreth
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Institute for Nuclear Theory, Box 351560, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA.
authors.forename: G F
authors.initials: GF
authors.lastname: Bertsch