No Arabic abstract
An introduction to nuclear theory is given starting from the quantum chromodynamics foundations for quark and gluon fields, then discussing properties of pions and nucleons, interactions between nucleons, structure of the deuteron and light nuclei, and finishing at the description of heavy nuclei. It is shown how concepts of different energy and size scales and ideas related to effective fields and symmetry breaking, enter our description of nuclear systems.
The binding energy differences of the valence proton and neutron of the mirror nuclei, $^{15}$O -- $^{15}$N, $^{17}$F -- $^{17}$O, $^{39}$Ca -- $^{39}$K and $^{41}$Sc -- $^{41}$Ca, are calculated using the quark-meson coupling (QMC) model. The calculation involves nuclear structure and shell effects explicitly. It is shown that binding energy differences of a few hundred keV arise from the strong interaction, even after subtracting all electromagnetic corrections. The origin of these differences may be ascribed to the charge symmetry breaking effects set in the strong interaction through the u and d current quark mass difference.
Spontaneous symmetry breaking in non-relativistic quantum systems has previously been addressed in the framework of effective field theory. Low-lying excitations are constructed from Nambu-Goldstone modes using symmetry arguments only. We extend that approach to finite systems. The approach is very general. To be specific, however, we consider atomic nuclei with intrinsically deformed ground states. The emergent symmetry breaking in such systems requires the introduction of additional degrees of freedom on top of the Nambu-Goldstone modes. Symmetry arguments suffice to construct the low-lying states of the system. In deformed nuclei these are vibrational modes each of which serves as band head of a rotational band.
In this work we present the first steps towards benchmarking isospin symmetry breaking in ab initio nuclear theory for calculations of superallowed Fermi $beta$-decay. Using the valence-space in-medium similarity renormalization group, we calculate b and c coefficients of the isobaric multiplet mass equation, starting from two different Hamiltonians constructed from chiral effective field theory. We compare results to experimental measurements for all T=1 isobaric analogue triplets of relevance to superallowed $beta$-decay for masses A=10 to A=74 and find an overall agreement within approximately 250 keV of experimental data for both b and c coefficients. A greater level of accuracy, however, is obtained by a phenomenological Skyrme interaction or a classical charged-sphere estimate. Finally, we show that evolution of the valence-space operator does not meaningfully improve the quality of the coefficients with respect to experimental data, which indicates that higher-order many-body effects are likely not responsible for the observed discrepancies.
We give a short review of the quark-meson coupling (QMC) model, the quark-based model of finite nuclei and hadron interactions in a nuclear medium, highlighting on the relationship with the Skyrme effective nuclear forces. The model is based on a mean field description of nonoverlapping nucleon MIT bags bound by the self-consistent exchange of Lorentz-scalar-isoscalar, Lorentz-vector-isoscalar, and Lorentz-vector-isovector meson fields directly coupled to the light quarks up and down. In conventional nuclear physics the Skyrme effective forces are very popular, but, there is no satisfactory interpretation of the parameters appearing in the Skyrme forces. Comparing a many-body Hamiltonian generated by the QMC model in the zero-range limit with that of the Skyrme force, it is possible to obtain a remarkable agreement between the Skyrme force and the QMC effective interaction. Furthermore, it is shown that 3-body and higher order N-body forces are naturally included in the QMC-generated effective interaction.
Starting from general expressions of well-chosen symmetric nuclear matter quantities derived for both zero- and finite-range effective theories, we derive the contributions to the effective mass. We first show that, independently of the range, the two-body contribution is enough to describe correctly the saturation mechanism but gives an effective mass value around $m^*/m simeq 0.4$. Then, we show that the full interaction (by instance, an effective two-body density-dependent term on top of the pure two-body term) is needed to reach the accepted value $m^*/m simeq 0.7-0.8$.