Dipole excitation and geometry of Borromean nuclei

We analyze the Coulomb breakup cross sections of ¹¹Li and ⁶He nuclei using a three-body model with a density-dependent contact interaction. We show that the concentration of the B(E1) strength near the threshold can be well reproduced with this model. With the help of the calculated B(E1) value, we extract the root-mean-square (rms) distance between the core nucleus and the center-of-mass of two valence neutrons without resorting to the sum rule, which may suffer from unphysical Pauli forbidden transitions. Together with the empirical rms distance between the neutrons obtained from the matter radius study and also from the three-body correlation study in the breakup reaction, we convert these rms distances to the mean opening angle between the valence neutrons from the core nucleus. We find that the obtained mean opening angles in ¹¹Li and ⁶He agree with the three-body model predictions.