No Arabic abstract
[Background] Symmetry restoration and configuration mixing in the spirit of the generator coordinate method based on energy density functionals have become widely used techniques in low-energy nuclear structure physics. Recently, it has been pointed out that these techniques are ill-defined for standard Skyrme functionals, and a regularization procedure has been proposed to remove the resulting spuriosities from such calculations. This procedure imposes an integer power of the density for the density dependent terms of the functional. At present, only dated parameterizations of the Skyrme interaction fulfill this condition. [Purpose] To construct a set of parameterizations of the Skyrme energy density functional for multi-reference energy density functional calculations with regularization using the state-of-the-art fitting protocols. [Method] The parameterizations were adjusted to reproduce ground state properties of a selected set of doubly magic nuclei and properties of nuclear matter. Subsequently, these parameter sets were validated against properties of spherical and deformed nuclei. [Results] Our parameter sets successfully reproduce the experimental binding energies and charge radii for a wide range of singly-magic nuclei. Compared to the widely used SLy5 and to the SIII parameterization that has integer powers of the density, a significant improvement of the reproduction of the data is observed. Similarly, a good description of the deformation properties at $Asim 80$ was obtained. [Conclusions] We have constructed new Skyrme parameterizations with integer powers of the density and validated them against a broad set of experimental data for spherical and deformed nuclei. These parameterizations are tailor-made for regularized multi-reference energy density functional calculations and can be used to study correlations beyond the mean-field in atomic nuclei.
Background: Extensions of single-reference (SR) energy-density-functionals (EDFs) to multi-reference (MR) applications involve using the generalized Wick theorem (GWT), which leads to singular energy kernels that cannot be properly integrated to restore symmetries, unless the EDFs are generated by true interactions. Purpose: We propose a new method to regularize the MR EDFs, which is based on using auxiliary quantities obtained by multiplying the kernels with appropriate powers of overlaps. Methods: Regularized matrix elements of two-body interactions are obtained by integrating the auxiliary quantities and then solving simple linear equations. Results: We implement the new regularization method within the self-consistent Skyrme-Hartree-Fock approach and we perform a proof-of-principle angular-momentum projection (AMP) of states in odd-odd nucleus 26Al. We show that for EDFs generated by true interactions, our regularization method gives results identical to those obtained within the standard AMP procedure. We also show that for EDFs that do not correspond to true interactions, it gives stable and converging results that are different than unstable and non-converging standard AMP values. Conclusions: The new regularization method proposed in this work may provide us with a relatively inexpensive and efficient tool to generalize SR EDFs to MR applications, thus allowing for symmetry restoration and configuration mixing performed for typical nuclear EDFs, which most often do not correspond to true interactions.
We present results of calculations based on the Skyrme energy density functional including the arbitrary mixing between protons and neutrons. In this framework, single-particle states are superpositions of proton and neutron components and the energy density functional is fully invariant with respect to three-dimensional rotations in the isospin space. The isospin of the system is controlled by means of the isocranking method, which carries over the standard cranking approach to the isospin space. We show numerical results of the isocranking calculations performed for isobaric analogue states in the A=14 and $A=40-56$ nuclei. We also present such results obtained for high-isospin states in $^{48}$Cr, with constraints on the isospin implemented by using the augmented Lagrange method.
Pioneering study of Gamow-Teller (GT) and Fermi matrix elements (MEs) using no-core-configuration-interaction formalism rooted in multi-reference density functional theory is presented. After successful test performed for 6He -> 6Li beta-decay, the model is applied to compute MEs in the sd- and pf-shell T=1/2 mirror nuclei. The calculated GT MEs and the isospin-symmetry-breaking corrections to the Fermi branch are found to be in a very good agreement with shell-model predictions in spite of fundamental differences between these models concerning model space, treatment of correlations or inclusion of a core. This result indirectly supports the two-body current based scenarios behind the quenching of axial-vector coupling constant.
We study the problem of an impurity in fully polarized (spin-up) low density neutron matter with the help of an accurate quantum Monte Carlo method in conjunction with a realistic nucleon-nucleon interaction derived from chiral effective field theory at next-to-next-to-leading-order. Our calculations show that the behavior of the proton spin-down impurity is very similar to that of a polaron in a fully polarized unitary Fermi gas. We show that our results can be used to put tight constraints on the time-odd parts of the energy density functional, independent of the time-even parts, in the density regime relevant to neutron-rich nuclei and compact astrophysical objects such as neutron stars and supernovae.
In contrast to the non-relativistic approaches, three-dimensional (3D) mesh calculations for the {it relativistic} density functional theory have not been realized because of the challenges of variational collapse and fermion doubling. We overcome these difficulties by developing a novel method based on the ideas of Wilson fermion as well as the variational principle for the inverse Hamiltonian. We demonstrate the applicability of this method by applying it to $^{16}$O, $^{24}$Mg, and $^{28}$Si nuclei, providing detailed explanation on the formalism and verification of numerical implementation.