Observation of Long-Range Three-Body Coulomb Effects in the Decay of Ne-16

The interaction of an E/A = 57.6-MeV Ne-17 beam with a Be target is used to populate levels in Ne-16 following neutron knockout reactions. The decay of 16Ne states into the three-body O-14 + p + p continuum is observed in the High Resolution Array (HiRA). For the first time for a 2p emitter, correlations between the momenta of the three decay products are measured with sufficient resolution and statistics to allow for an unambiguous demonstration of their dependence on the long-range nature of the Coulomb interaction. Contrary to previous measurements, our measured limit Gamma < 80 keV for the intrinsic decay width of the ground state is not in contradiction to the small values (of the order of keV) predicted theoretically.