Interplay between valence and core excitation mechanisms in the breakup of halo nuclei

The phenomenon of core excitation in the breakup of a two-body halo nucleus is investigated. We show that this effect plays a significant role in the reaction dynamics and, furthermore, its interference with the valence excitation mechanism has sizable and measurable effects on the breakup angular distributions. These effects have been studied in the resonant breakup of (11)Be on a carbon target, populating the resonances at 1.78 MeV (5/2(+)) and 3.41 MeV (3/2(+)). The calculations have been performed using a recent extension of the distorted-wave Born approximation method, which takes into account the effect of core excitation in both the structure of the halo nucleus and in the reaction mechanism. The calculated angular distributions have been compared with the available data [Fukuda et al., Phys. Rev. C 70, 054606 (2004).]. Although each of these resonances is dominated by one of the two considered mechanisms, the angular patterns of these resonances depend in a very delicate way on the interference between them. This is the first clear evidence of this effect but the phenomenon is likely to occur in other similar reactions.