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We provide a brief commentary on recent work by Hammer and Son on the scaling behavior of nuclear reactions involving the emission of several loosely bound neutrons. In this work they discover a regime, termed unnuclear physics, in which these reactions are governed by an approximate conformal symmetry of the nuclear force. Remarkably, the scaling exponents that govern nuclear reactions can be related to the energies of ultracold atomic drops confined in harmonic potentials. We also comment on the importance and the limitations of this approximate symmetry in the physics of neutron stars.
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Physical systems characterized by a shallow two-body bound or virtual state are governed at large distances by a continuous-scale invariance, which is broken to a discrete one when three or more particles come into play. This symmetry induces a universal behavior for different systems, independent of the details of the underlying interaction, rooted in the smallness of the ratio $ell/a_B ll 1$, where the length $a_B$ is associated to the binding energy of the two-body system $E_2=hbar^2/m a_B^2$ and $ell$ is the natural length given by the interaction range. Efimov physics refers to this universal behavior, which is often hidden by the on-set of system-specific non-universal effects. In this work we identify universal properties by providing an explicit link of physical systems to their unitary limit, in which $a_Brightarrowinfty$, and show that nuclear systems belong to this class of universality.
Using many-body perturbation theory and coupled-cluster theory, we calculate the ground-state energy of He-4 and O-16. We perform these calculations using a no-core G-matrix interaction derived from a realistic nucleon-nucleon potential. Our calculations employ up to two-particle-two-hole coupled-cluster amplitudes.
How do protons and neutrons bind to form nuclei? This is the central question of ab initio nuclear structure theory. While the answer may seem as simple as the fact that nuclear forces are attractive, the full story is more complex and interesting. In this work we present numerical evidence from ab initio lattice simulations showing that nature is near a quantum phase transition, a zero-temperature transition driven by quantum fluctuations. Using lattice effective field theory, we perform Monte Carlo simulations for systems with up to twenty nucleons. For even and equal numbers of protons and neutrons, we discover a first-order transition at zero temperature from a Bose-condensed gas of alpha particles (4He nuclei) to a nuclear liquid. Whether one has an alpha-particle gas or nuclear liquid is determined by the strength of the alpha-alpha interactions, and we show that the alpha-alpha interactions depend on the strength and locality of the nucleon-nucleon interactions. This insight should be useful in improving calculations of nuclear structure and important astrophysical reactions involving alpha capture on nuclei. Our findings also provide a tool to probe the structure of alpha cluster states such as the Hoyle state responsible for the production of carbon in red giant stars and point to a connection between nuclear states and the universal physics of bosons at large scattering length.
The structure of few-fermion systems having $1/2$ spin-isospin symmetry is studied using potential models. The strength and range of the two-body potentials are fixed to describe low energy observables in the angular momentum $L=0$ state and spin $S=0,1$ channels of the two-body system. Successively the strength of the potentials are varied in order to explore energy regions in which the two-body scattering lengths are close to the unitary limit. This study is motivated by the fact that in the nuclear system the singlet and triplet scattering lengths are both large with respect to the range of the interaction. Accordingly we expect evidence of universal behavior in the three- and four-nucleon systems that can be observed from the study of correlations between observables. In particular we concentrate in the behavior of the first excited state of the three-nucleon system as the system moves away from the unitary limit. We also analyze the dependence on the range of the three-body force of some low-energy observables in the three- and four-nucleon systems.
In this contribution I will review some of the researches that are currently being pursued in Padova (mainly within the In:Theory and Strength projects), focusing on the interdisciplinary applications of nuclear theory to several other branches of physics, with the aim of contributing to show the centrality of nuclear theory in the Italian scientific scenario and the prominence of this fertile field in fostering new physics. In particular, I will talk about: i) the recent solution of the long-standing electron screening puzzle that settles a fundamental controversy in nuclear astrophysics between the outcome of lab experiments on earth and nuclear reactions happening in stars; the application of algebraic methods to very diverse systems such as: ii) the supramolecular complex H2@C60, i.e. a diatomic hydrogen molecule caged in a fullerene and iii) to the spectrum of hypernuclei, i.e. systems made of a Lambda particles trapped in (heavy) nuclei.
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