Abstract
We construct a nuclear interaction in chiral effective field theory with explicit inclusion of the Δ-isobar Δ(1232) degree of freedom at all orders up to next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO). We use pion-nucleon (πN) low-energy constants (LECs) from a Roy-Steiner analysis of πN scattering data, optimize the LECs in the contact potentials up to NNLO to reproduce low-energy nucleon-nucleon scattering phase shifts, and constrain the three-nucleon interaction at NNLO to reproduce the binding energy and point-proton radius of He4. For heavier nuclei we use the coupled-cluster method to compute binding energies, radii, and neutron skins. We find that radii and binding energies are much improved for interactions with explicit inclusion of Δ(1232), while Δ-less interactions produce nuclei that are not bound with respect to breakup into α particles. The saturation of nuclear matter is significantly improved, and its symmetry energy is consistent with empirical estimates.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 024332 |
| Journal | Physical Review C |
| Volume | 97 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Feb 26 2018 |
Funding
We would like to thank Hermann Krebs for valuable discussions and input on the manuscript, Kai Hebeler for providing us with matrix elements in Jacobi coordinates for the three-nucleon interaction, and Gustav Jansen for providing us with the code that transforms three-nucleon matrix elements to the laboratory system. This material is based upon work supported by the Swedish Research Council under Grant No. 2015-00225, and the Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions, Cofund, Project No. INCA 600398, the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics under Grants No. DEFG02-96ER40963 (University of Tennessee), No. DE-SC0008499, and No. DE-SC0018223 (NUCLEI SciDAC collaboration), and the Field Work Proposal ERKBP57 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Computer time was provided by the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. This research used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility located in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725, and used computational resources of the National Center for Computational Sciences, the National Institute for Computational Sciences, and the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) project SNIC 2016/1-157.