We present microscopic valence-shell calculations of pairing gaps in the calcium isotopes, focusing on the role of three-nucleon (3N) forces and many-body processes. In most cases, we find a reduction in pairing strength when the leading chiral 3N fo
rces are included, compared to results with low-momentum two-nucleon (NN) interactions only. This is in agreement with a recent energy density functional study. At the NN level, calculations that include particle-particle and hole-hole ladder contributions lead to smaller pairing gaps compared with experiment. When particle-hole contributions as well as the normal-ordered one- and two-body parts of 3N forces are consistently included to third order, we find reasonable agreement with experimental three-point mass differences. This highlights the important role of 3N forces and many-body processes for pairing in nuclei. Finally, we relate pairing gaps to the evolution of nuclear structure in neutron-rich calcium isotopes and study the predictions for the 2+ excitation energies, in particular for 54Ca.
Chiral effective field theory (EFT) provides a systematic expansion for the coupling of WIMPs to nucleons at the momentum transfers relevant to direct cold dark matter detection. We derive the currents for spin-dependent WIMP scattering off nuclei at
the one-body level and include the leading long-range two-body currents, which are predicted in chiral EFT. As an application, we calculate the structure factor for spin-dependent WIMP scattering off 129,131Xe nuclei, using nuclear interactions that have been developed to study nuclear structure and double-beta decays in this region. We provide theoretical error bands due to the nuclear uncertainties of WIMP currents in nuclei.
We discuss renormalization group approaches to strongly interacting Fermi systems, in the context of Landaus theory of Fermi liquids and functional methods, and their application to neutron matter.
We show that chiral effective field theory (EFT) two-body currents provide important contributions to the quenching of low-momentum-transfer Gamow-Teller transitions, and use chiral EFT to predict the momentum-transfer dependence that is probed in ne
utrinoless double-beta decay. We then calculate for the first time the neutrinoless double-beta decay operator based on chiral EFT currents and study the nuclear matrix elements at successive orders. The contributions from chiral two-body currents are significant and should be included in all calculations.
We show that the contributions of three-quasiparticle interactions to normal Fermi systems at low energies and temperatures are suppressed by n_q/n compared to two-body interactions, where n_q is the density of excited or added quasiparticles and n i
s the ground-state density. For finite Fermi systems, three-quasiparticle contributions are suppressed by the corresponding ratio of particle numbers N_q/N. This is illustrated for polarons in strongly interacting spin-polarized Fermi gases and for valence neutrons in neutron-rich calcium isotopes.
