Density dependence of the nuclear symmetry energy from measurements of neutron radii in nuclei

We study the density dependence of the nuclear symmetry energy, characterized by its slope parameter L, by means of the information provided by the neutron radius and the neutron skin thickness in finite nuclei. These quantities are extracted from the analysis of data obtained in antiprotonic atoms, from the parity-violating asymmetry at low-momentum transfer in polarized electron scattering in 208Pb, and from the electric dipole polarizability obtained via polarized proton inelastic scattering at forward angles in 208Pb. All these experiments provide different constraints on the slope L of the symmetry energy but the corresponding values have a considerable overlap in a range around 50 MeV ≤ L ≤ 70 MeV, in a reasonable agreement with other estimates that use different observables and methods to extract L