Nuclear Pairing: Surface or Bulk ?

We analyse how the spatial localisation properties of pairing correlations are changing in a major neutron shell of heavy nuclei. It is shown that the radial distribution of the pairing density depends strongly on whether the chemical potential is close to a low or a high angular momentum level and has very little sensitivity to whether the pairing force acts in the surface or in the bulk. The averaged pairing density over one major shell is however rather flat, practically independent of the pairing force. Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov calculations for the isotopic chain $^{100-132}$Sn are presented for demonstration purposes.