Speaker
Description
Clustering in finite nuclei is best understood not as an isolated peculiarity of a few light systems, but as a structural and dynamical regime whose signatures run from spectroscopy to decay. In this talk, I will discuss how cluster correlations emerge, evolve, and eventually disappear as nuclei are driven across density- and temperature-controlled regimes, including dilution-induced quantum transitions and thermal effects in finite systems. I will focus on the spectroscopic fingerprints of these regimes, as revealed by microscopic beyond-mean-field and linear-response approaches, and on their extension to collision observables based on ab initio nuclear-structure inputs. I will then show how the same physics reappears on the decay side, through alpha, 2-alpha, and heavier-cluster emission. Altogether, these results point to a unified microscopic picture in which cluster phases, collective excitations, collision imprints, and cluster decay are different manifestations of the same underlying finite-nuclear dynamics.