Reactions of halo states: Coulomb excitations

Coulomb dissociation is a relatively clean probe of the structures of one- and two-nucleon halo nuclei. This is illustrated by the breakup of {sup 11}Be, {sup 8}B and {sup 11}Li and is discussed in terms of first order perturbation theory. First-order dipole transitions usually dominate the Coulomb dissociation but quadrupole transitions are not insignificant for a proton halo (e.g. {sup 8}B). Higher-order processes can also distort the observables, such as the momentum distributions of the fragments and the excitation energy spectrum