No Arabic abstract
The traditional approach to nuclear physics encodes phase shift information in a nucleon-nucleon (NN) potential, producing a nucleon-level interaction that captures the sub-GeV consequences of QCD. A further reduction to the nuclear scale is needed to produce an effective interaction for soft Hilbert spaces, such as those employed in the shell model. Here we describe an alternative construction of this effective interaction, from QCD directly to the nuclear scale, that is direct and precise. This eliminates the need for constructing and renormalizing the high-momentum NN potential. Instead, continuum phase shifts and mixing angles are used directly at the nuclear scale. The method exploits the analytic continuity in energy of HOBET (Harmonic-Oscillator-Based Effective Theory) to connect bound states to continuum solutions at specific energies. The procedure is systematic, cutoff independent, and convergent, yielding keV accuracy at NNLO or N$^3$LO, depending on the channel. Lepage plots are provided.
The standard approach to nuclear physics encodes phase shift information in an NN potential, then decodes that information in forming an effective interaction, appropriate to a low-momentum Hilbert space. Here we show that it is instead possible to construct the effective interaction directly from continuum phase shifts and mixing angles, eliminating all reference to a high momentum potential. The theory is rapidly convergent and well behaved, yielding sub-keV accuracy.
We explore the lattice spacing dependence in Nuclear Lattice Effective Field Theory for few-body systems up to next-to-next-to leading order in chiral effective field theory including all isospin breaking and electromagnetic effects, the complete two-pion-exchange potential and the three-nucleon forces. We calculate phase shifts in the neutron-proton system and proton-proton systems as well as the scattering length in the neutron-neutron system. We then perform a full next-to-next-to-leading order calculation with two-nucleon and three-nucleon forces for the triton and helium-4 and analyse their binding energy correlation. We show how the Tjon band is reached by decreasing the lattice spacing and confirm the continuum observation that a four-body force is not necessary to describe light nuclei.
We investigate Nuclear Lattice Effective Field Theory for the two-body system for several lattice spacings at lowest order in the pionless as well as in the pionful theory. We discuss issues of regularizations and predictions for the effective range expansion. In the pionless case, a simple Gaussian smearing allows to demonstrate lattice spacing independence over a wide range of lattice spacings. We show that regularization methods known from the continuum formulation are necessary as well as feasible for the pionful approach.
We present a systematic study of neutron-proton scattering in Nuclear Lattice Effective Field Theory (NLEFT), in terms of the computationally efficient radial Hamiltonian method. Our leading-order (LO) interaction consists of smeared, local contact terms and static one-pion exchange. We show results for a fully non-perturbative analysis up to next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO), followed by a perturbative treatment of contributions beyond LO. The latter analysis anticipates practical Monte Carlo simulations of heavier nuclei. We explore how our results depend on the lattice spacing a, and estimate sources of uncertainty in the determination of the low-energy constants of the next-to-leading-order (NLO) two-nucleon force. We give results for lattice spacings ranging from a = 1.97 fm down to a = 0.98 fm, and discuss the effects of lattice artifacts on the scattering observables. At a = 0.98 fm, lattice artifacts appear small, and our NNLO results agree well with the Nijmegen partial-wave analysis for S-wave and P-wave channels. We expect the peripheral partial waves to be equally well described once the lattice momenta in the pion-nucleon coupling are taken to coincide with the continuum dispersion relation, and higher-order (N3LO) contributions are included. We stress that for center-of-mass momenta below 100 MeV, the physics of the two-nucleon system is independent of the lattice spacing.
We formulate microscopic optical potentials for nucleon-nucleus scattering from chiral two- and three-nucleon forces. The real and imaginary central terms of the optical potentials are obtained from the nucleon self energy in infinite nuclear matter at a given density and isospin asymmetry, calculated self-consistently to second order in many-body perturbation theory. The real spin-orbit term is extracted from the same chiral potential using an improved density matrix expansion. The density-dependent optical potential is then folded with the nuclear density distributions of 40Ca, 42Ca, 44Ca, and 48Ca from which we study proton-nucleus elastic scattering and total reaction cross sections using the reaction code TALYS. We compare the results of the microscopic calculations to those of phenomenological models and experimental data up to projectile energies of E = 180 MeV. While overall satisfactory agreement with the available experimental data is obtained, we find that the elastic scattering and total reaction cross sections can be significantly improved with a weaker imaginary optical potential, particularly for larger projectile energies.