No Arabic abstract
Recently, we have shown that the continuity equation for the nuclear vector and axial current operators acquires additional terms if the latter depend on the energy transfer. We analyze in detail the electromagnetic single-nucleon four-current operators and verify the validity of the modified continuity equation for all one- and two-nucleon contributions up to fourth order in the chiral expansion. We also derive, for the first time, the leading contribution to the three-nucleon charge operator which appears at this order. Our study completes the derivation of the electroweak nuclear currents to fourth order in the chiral expansion.
Two-nucleon axial charge and current operators are derived in chiral effective field theory up to one loop. The derivation is based on time-ordered perturbation theory, and accounts for cancellations between the contributions of irreducible diagrams and the contributions due to non-static corrections from energy denominators of reducible diagrams. Ultraviolet divergencies associated with the loop corrections are isolated in dimensional regularization. The resulting axial current is finite and conserved in the chiral limit, while the axial charge requires renormalization. A complete set of contact terms for the axial charge up to the relevant order in the power counting is constructed.
Since the pioneering work of Weinberg, Chiral Effective Field Theory ($chi$EFT) has been widely and successfully utilized in nuclear physics to study many-nucleon interactions and associated electroweak currents. Nuclear $chi$EFT has now developed into an intense field of research and is applied to study light to medium mass nuclei. In this contribution, we focus on the development of electroweak currents from $chi$EFT and present applications to selected nuclear electroweak observables.
Using effective field theory methods, we calculate for the first time the complete fourth-order term in the Fermi-momentum or $k_{rm F} a_s$ expansion for the ground-state energy of a dilute Fermi gas. The convergence behavior of the expansion is examined for the case of spin one-half fermions and compared against quantum Monte-Carlo results, showing that the Fermi-momentum expansion is well-converged at this order for $| k_{rm F} a_s | lesssim 0.5$.
We perform state-of-the-art large-scale shell-model calculations of the structure factors for elastic spin-dependent WIMP scattering off 129,131Xe, 127I, 73Ge, 19F, 23Na, 27Al, and 29Si. This comprehensive survey covers the non-zero-spin nuclei relevant to direct dark matter detection. We include a pedagogical presentation of the formalism necessary to describe elastic and inelastic WIMP-nucleus scattering. The valence spaces and nuclear interactions employed have been previously used in nuclear structure calculations for these mass regions and yield a good spectroscopic description of these isotopes. We use spin-dependent WIMP-nucleus currents based on chiral effective field theory (EFT) at the one-body level and including the leading long-range two-body currents due to pion exchange, which are predicted in chiral EFT. Results for all structure factors are provided with theoretical error bands due to the nuclear uncertainties of WIMP currents in nuclei.
Chiral effective field theory ($chi$EFT), as originally proposed by Weinberg, promises a theoretical connection between low-energy nuclear interactions and quantum chromodynamics (QCD). However, the important property of renormalization-group (RG) invariance is not fulfilled in current implementations and its consequences for predicting atomic nuclei beyond two- and three-nucleon systems has remained unknown. In this work we present a first and systematic study of recent RG-invariant formulations of $chi$EFT and their predictions for the binding energies and other observables of selected nuclear systems with mass-numbers up to $A =16$. Specifically, we have carried out ab initio no-core shell-model and coupled cluster calculations of the ground-state energy of $^3$H, $^{3,4}$He, $^{6}$Li, and $^{16}$O using several recent power-counting (PC) schemes at leading order (LO) and next-to-leading order (NLO), where the subleading interactions are treated in perturbation theory. Our calculations indicate that RG-invariant and realistic predictions can be obtained for nuclei with mass number $A leq 4$. We find, however, that $^{16}$O is either unbound with respect to the four $alpha$-particle threshold, or deformed, or both. Similarly, we find that the $^{6}$Li ground-state resides above the $alpha$-deuteron separation threshold. These results are in stark contrast with experimental data and point to either necessary fine-tuning of all relevant counterterms, or that current state-of-the-art RG-invariant PC schemes at LO in $chi$EFT lack necessary diagrams -- such as three-nucleon forces -- to realistically describe nuclei with mass number $A>4$.