No Arabic abstract
We present a family of nucleon-nucleon (NN) plus three-nucleon (3N) interactions up to N3LO in the chiral expansion that provides an accurate ab initio description of ground-state energies and charge radii up to the medium-mass regime with quantified theory uncertainties. Starting from the NN interactions proposed by Entem, Machleidt and Nosyk, we construct 3N interactions with consistent chiral order, non-local regulator, and cutoff value and explore the dependence of nuclear observables over a range of mass numbers on the 3N low-energy constants. By fixing these constants using the 3-H and 16-O ground-state energies, we obtain interactions that robustly reproduce experimental energies and radii for large range from p-shell nuclei to the nickel isotopic chain and resolve many of the deficiencies of previous interactions. Based on the order-by-order convergence and the cutoff dependence of nuclear observables, we assess the uncertainties due the interaction, which yield a significant contribution to the total theory uncertainty.
We derive from the subleading contributions to the chiral three-nucleon interaction [published in Phys.~Rev.~C77, 064004 (2008) and Phys.~Rev.~C84, 054001 (2011)] their first-order contributions to the energy per particle of isospin-symmetric nuclear matter and pure neutron matter in an analytical way. For the variety of short-range and long-range terms that constitute the subleading chiral 3N-force the pertinent closed 3-ring, 2-ring, and 1-ring diagrams are evaluated. While 3-ring diagrams vanish by a spin-trace and the results for 2-ring diagrams can be given in terms of elementary functions of the ratio Fermi-momentum over pion mass, one ends up in most cases for the closed 1-ring diagrams with one-parameter integrals. The same treatment is applied to the subsubleading chiral three-nucleon interactions as far as these have been constructed up to now.
We investigate selected static and transition properties of $^{12}$C using ab initio No-Core Shell Model (NCSM) methods with chiral two- and three-nucleon interactions. We adopt the Similarity Renormalization Group (SRG) to assist convergence including up to three-nucleon (3N) contributions. We examine the dependences of the $^{12}$C observables on the SRG evolution scale and on the model-space parameters. We obtain nearly converged low-lying excitation spectra. We compare results of the full NCSM with the Importance Truncated NCSM in large model spaces for benchmarking purposes. We highlight the effects of the chiral 3N interaction on several spectroscopic observables. The agreement of some observables with experiment is improved significantly by the inclusion of 3N interactions, e.g., the B(M1) from the first $J^pi T = 1^+ 1$ state to the ground state. However, in some cases the agreement deteriorates, e.g., for the excitation energy of the first $1^+ 0$ state, leaving room for improved next-generation chiral Hamiltonians.
A discussion is presented of the dynamics underlying three-body nuclear forces, with emphasis on changes which occurred over several decades.
We perform coupled-cluster calculations for the doubly magic nuclei 4He, 16O, 40Ca and 48Ca, for neutron-rich isotopes of oxygen and fluorine, and employ bare and secondary renormalized nucleon-nucleon interactions. For the nucleon-nucleon interaction from chiral effective field theory at order next-to-next-to-next-to leading order, we find that the coupled-cluster approximation including triples corrections binds nuclei within 0.4 MeV per nucleon compared to data. We employ interactions from a resolution-scale dependent similarity renormalization group transformations and assess the validity of power counting estimates in medium-mass nuclei. We find that the missing contributions due to three-nucleon forces are consistent with these estimates. For the unitary correlator model potential, we find a slow convergence with respect to increasing the size of the model space. For the G-matrix approach, we find a weak dependence of ground-state energies on the starting energy combined with a rather slow convergence with respect to increasing model spaces. We also analyze the center-of-mass problem and present a practical and efficient solution.
We compute the binding energies, radii, and densities for selected medium-mass nuclei within coupled-cluster theory and employ the bare chiral nucleon-nucleon interaction at order N3LO. We find rather well-converged results in model spaces consisting of 15 oscillator shells, and the doubly magic nuclei 40Ca, 48Ca, and the exotic 48Ni are underbound by about 1 MeV per nucleon within the CCSD approximation. The binding-energy difference between the mirror nuclei 48Ca and 48Ni is close to theoretical mass table evaluations. Our computation of the one-body density matrices and the corresponding natural orbitals and occupation numbers provides a first step to a microscopic foundation of the nuclear shell model.