Zakopane 2026 Conference on Nuclear Physics

Nuclear deformation is a prominent feature of nuclei far from stability, where deviations from conventional shell closures often lead to the emergence of various shapes. Characterising these shapes remains a significant challenge for both theory and experiment. In this work, we demonstrate that one-nucleon knockout reactions and their associated spectroscopic factors serve as a sensitive probe of nuclear shapes. As a representative case, we discuss $^{42}$Si, a nucleus lying in the N=28 shell closure. Using antisymmetrized molecular dynamics (AMD) combined with the generator coordinate method (GCM), we demonstrate how the underlying shape characteristics of $^{42}$Si are reflected via spectroscopic factors and knockout reactions.