The extraction of higher-order radial moments of nuclear charge density from muonic atom spectroscopy

Abstract

Muonic atom transitions have been measured for almost all stable nuclei to extract nuclear structure properties, including nuclear charge radii and quadrupole moment. To investigate the possibilities of extracting higher-order radial moments of nuclear charge density %what kind of information of nuclear charge distribution can be extracted precisely from muonic atom spectroscopy, a theory-to-theory benchmark analysis based on a model-independent density distribution, i.e., the Fourier-Bessel series expansion instead of two-parameter Fermi distribution, is performed by taking $^{208}$Pb as an example, where nuclear charge density obtained from the relativistic continuum Hartree-Bogoliubov calculation is used as the benchmark. It is found that the extractions of the higher-order moments, i.e., the fourth and sixth moments in addition to the second moment are feasible with high accuracy. Moreover, the charge form factor in the low-$q$ region can also be well extracted.