How to extract neutron interactions from nuclear breakup

When a high-energy probe breaks apart a nucleus, it preferentially knocks out the heavy core, leaving the lighter particles behind. The team proves that in this quasi-free kinematic regime, the remaining amplitude depends only on how those leftover particles scatter and the bound-state wavefunction—making it possible to extract multi-neutron interaction data from deuteron and halo-nucleus experiments without detailed knowledge of nuclear dynamics.