Neutron skin studies of medium and heavy nuclei

Abstract

The recent PREX experiment at JLab has demonstrated the sensitivity of parity violating electron scattering to the neutron density, meanwhile outlining its major experimental challenges. On the other side, intermediate energy photons are an ideal probe for studying the properties of strongly interacting matter from the nuclear scale down to the sub-nuclear components of the nucleus. Among others coherent pion photoproduction can provide information on the existence and nature of neutron skins in nuclei. The simultaneous combination of different techniques allows a systematic determination across the periodic table thus benchmarking modern calculation. Recently a systematic investigation of the latter method has been exploited at MAMI (Mainz). At MESA the same setup as in the measurement of the weak mixing angle can be used to determine the parity-violating asymmetry for polarized electrons scattered on heavy nuclei with a 1% resolution. Status and prospects of the projects are presented.