Microscopic examination of NpNn dominance in the evolution of nuclear structure

The proton-neutron interaction in determining the evolution of nuclear structure has been studied by using the Brillouin-Wigner perturbation expansion. The particle-hole and particle-particle p-n interactions are unifiedly described in the theory. The obtained formulas of level energies and excitation energies scaled in the small- and large-NpNn limits can well explain the linearity of the extracted proton-neutron interaction energies and the attenuation of the 2(1)(+) excitation energies against the valence nucleon product NpNn for five mass regions from A = 100-200.