This paper tackles a long-standing puzzle in nuclear experiments: one-neutron removal reactions show a strong dependence on proton–neutron imbalance that could either reflect real changes in how single neutrons sit in the nucleus, or be an artifact of the reaction itself. The authors argue the latter can be important. They reframe the measured, inclusive yield as a two-stage process: a fast dynamical removal followed by slower deexcitation (evaporation) of the excited fragments. By estimating how much the slow stage feeds or removes counts from the observed channel, they build a “purified” measure that better reflects the underlying single-particle strength.

In practice, the team tested this idea against a large, mutually constraining dataset: 73 published one-neutron removal cross sections and 28 measured residue parallel-momentum distributions. They used an isospin-dependent quantum molecular dynamics model (IQMD) to simulate the fast collision stage and then the GEMINI code to simulate the subsequent statistical evaporation. The eikonal calculation with shell-model spectroscopic factors was kept as the standard, direct-reaction reference. IQMD+GEMINI was used only to estimate how much evaporation fed the observed residue and how much of the direct removal yield was lost by further decay.

The model separates the observed residue yield into three parts: evaporation feeding from excited intact projectiles, the surviving part of the directly produced A−1 prefragments, and the part of those prefragments lost by further evaporation. Evaporation feeding tends to dominate for neutron-rich projectiles (small neutron separation energy S_n), while the surviving direct component grows toward neutron-deficient systems. The calculation reproduces the global trends in the inclusive cross sections and the widths of the residue momentum distributions, supporting the proposed decomposition.