Three-body structure of low-lying 18Ne states

We investigate to what extent 18Ne can be descibed as a three-body system made of an inert 16O core and two protons. We compare to experimental data and occasionally to shell model results. We obtain three-body wave functions with the hyperspherical adiabatic expansion method. We study the spectrum of 18Ne , the structure of the different states and the predominant transition strengths. Two 0+, two 2+, and one 4+ bound states are found where they are all known experimentally. Also one 3+ close to threshold is found and several negative-parity states, 1-, 3-, 0-, 2-, most of them bound with respect to the 16O excited 3- state. The structures are extracted as partial-wave components, as spatial sizes of matter and charge, and as probability distributions. Electromagnetic decay rates are calculated for these states. The dominating decay mode for the bound states is E2 and occasionally also M1 .