Pairing and realistic shell-model interactions

This paper starts with a brief historical overview of pairing in nuclei, which fulfills the purpose of properly framing the main subject. This concerns the pairing properties of a realistic shell-model effective interaction which has proved very successful in describing nuclei around doubly magic 132Sn. We focus attention on the two nuclei 134Te and 134Sn with two valence protons and neutrons, respectively. Our study brings out the key role of one particle-one hole excitations in producing a significant difference between proton and neutron pairing in this region.

Unitarity potentials and neutron matter at the unitary limit

We study the equation of state of neutron matter using a family of unitarity potentials all of which are constructed to have infinite $^1S_0$ scattering lengths $a_s$. For such system, a quantity of much interest is the ratio $xi=E_0/E_0^{free}$ where $E_0$ is the true ground-state energy of the system, and $E_0^{free}$ is that for the non-interacting system. In the limit of $a_sto pm infty$, often referred to as the unitary limit, this ratio is expected to approach a universal constant, namely $xisim 0.44(1)$. In the present work we calculate this ratio $xi$ using a family of hard-core square-well potentials whose $a_s$ can be exactly obtained, thus enabling us to have many potentials of different ranges and strengths, all with infinite $a_s$. We have also calculated $xi$ using a unitarity CDBonn potential obtained by slightly scaling its meson parameters. The ratios $xi$ given by these different unitarity potentials are all close to each other and also remarkably close to 0.44, suggesting that the above ratio $xi$ is indifferent to the details of the underlying interactions as long as they have infinite scattering length. A sum-rule and scaling constraint for the renormalized low-momentum interaction in neutron matter at the unitary limit is discussed.

Low-momentum ring diagrams of neutron matter at and near the unitary limit

We study neutron matter at and near the unitary limit using a low-momentum ring diagram approach. By slightly tuning the meson-exchange CD-Bonn potential, neutron-neutron potentials with various $^1S_0$ scattering lengths such as $a_s=-12070fm$ and $+21fm$ are constructed. Such potentials are renormalized with rigorous procedures to give the corresponding $a_s$-equivalent low-momentum potentials $V_{low-k}$, with which the low-momentum particle-particle hole-hole ring diagrams are summed up to all orders, giving the ground state energy $E_0$ of neutron matter for various scattering lengths. At the limit of $a_sto pm infty$, our calculated ratio of $E_0$ to that of the non-interacting case is found remarkably close to a constant of 0.44 over a wide range of Fermi-momenta. This result reveals an universality that is well consistent with the recent experimental and Monte-Carlo computational study on low-density cold Fermi gas at the unitary limit. The overall behavior of this ratio obtained with various scattering lengths is presented and discussed. Ring-diagram results obtained with $V_{low-k}$ and those with $G$-matrix interactions are compared.