No Arabic abstract
We report converged results for the ground and excited states and matter density of 16-O using realistic two-body nucleon-nucleon interactions and coupled-cluster methods and formalism developed in quantum chemistry. Most of the binding is obtained with the coupled-cluster singles and doubles approach. Additional binding due to three-body clusters (triples) is minimal. The coupled-cluster method with singles and doubles provides a good description of the matter density, charge radius, charge form factor, and excited states of a 1-particle-1-hole nature, but it cannot describe the first excited 0+ state. Incorporation of triples has no effect on the latter finding.
Using the ground-state energy of 16-O obtained with the realistic V_UCOM interaction as a test case, we present a comprehensive comparison of different configuration interaction (CI) and coupled-cluster (CC) methods, analyzing the intrinsic advantages and limitations of each of the approaches. In particular, we use the importance-truncated (IT) CI and no-core shell model (NCSM) schemes with up to 4-particle-4-hole (4p4h) excitations as well as the size extensive CC methods with a complete treatment of one- and two-body clusters (CCSD) and a non-iterative treatment of connected three-body clusters via the completely renormalized correction to the CCSD energy defining the CR-CC(2,3) approach. We discuss the impact of the center-of-mass contaminations, the choice of the single-particle basis, and size-extensivity on the resulting energies. When the IT-CI and IT-NCSM methods include the 4p4h excitations and when the CC calculations include the 1p1h, 2p2h, and 3p3h clusters, as in the CR-CC(2,3) approach, we observe an excellent agreement among the different methodologies. This shows that despite their individual limitations, the IT-CI, IT-NCSM, and CC methods can provide precise and consistent ab initio nuclear structure predictions. Furthermore, the IT-CI, IT-NCSM, and CC ground-state energy values obtained with 16-O are in good agreement with the experimental value, proving that the V_UCOM two-body interaction allows for a realistic description of binding energies for heavier nuclei and that all of the methods used in this study account for most of the relevant particle correlation effects.
Emergent properties such as nuclear saturation and deformation, and the effects on shell structure due to the proximity of the scattering continuum and particle decay channels are fascinating phenomena in atomic nuclei. In recent years, ab initio approaches to nuclei have taken the first steps towards tackling the computational challenge of describing these phenomena from Hamiltonians with microscopic degrees of freedom. This endeavor is now possible due to ideas from effective field theories, novel optimization strategies for nuclear interactions, ab initio methods exhibiting a soft scaling with mass number, and ever-increasing computational power. This paper reviews some of the recent accomplishments. We also present new results. The recently optimized chiral interaction NNLO$_{rm sat}$ is shown to provide an accurate description of both charge radii and binding energies in selected light- and medium-mass nuclei up to $^{56}$Ni. We derive an efficient scheme for including continuum effects in coupled-cluster computations of nuclei based on chiral nucleon-nucleon and three-nucleon forces, and present new results for unbound states in the neutron-rich isotopes of oxygen and calcium. The coupling to the continuum impacts the energies of the $J^pi = {1/2}^-,{3/2}^-,{7/2}^-,{3/2}^+$ states in $^{17,23,25}$O, and - contrary to naive shell-model expectations - the level ordering of the $J^pi = {3/2}^+,{5/2}^+,{9/2}^+$ states in $^{53,55,61}$Ca.
We study the ground and low-lying excited states of O-15, O-17, N-15, and F-17 using modern two-body nucleon-nucleon interactions and the suitably designed variants of the ab initio equation-of-motion coupled-cluster theory aimed at an accurate description of systems with valence particles and holes. A number of properties of O-15, O-17, N-15, and F-17, including ways the energies of ground and excited states of valence systems around O-16 change as functions of the number of nucleons, are correctly reproduced by the equation-of-motion coupled-cluster calculations. Within a harmonic oscillator basis and large effective model spaces, our results are converged for the chosen two-body Hamiltonians. Thus, all disagreements with experiment are, most likely, due to the degrees of freedom such as three-body interactions not accounted for in our effective two-body Hamiltonians. In particular, the calculated binding energies of O-15/N-15 and O-17/F-17 enable us to rationalize the discrepancy between the experimental and recently published [Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 212501 (2005)] equation-of-motion coupled-cluster excitation energies for the Jpi=3- state of O-16. The results demonstrate the feasibility of the equation-of-motion coupled-cluster methods to deal with valence systems around closed-shell nuclei and to provide precise results for systems beyond A=16.
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 demonstrate the capability of coupled-cluster theory to compute the Coulomb sum rule for the $^4$He and $^{16}$O nuclei using interactions from chiral effective field theory. We perform several checks, including a few-body benchmark for $^4$He. We provide an analysis of the center-of-mass contaminations, which we are able to safely remove. We then compare with other theoretical results and experimental data available in the literature, obtaining a fair agreement. This is a first and necessary step towards initiating a program for computing neutrino-nucleus interactions from first principles and supporting the experimental long-baseline neutrino program with a state-of-the-art theory that can reach medium-mass nuclei.