Abstract
Atomic nuclei exhibit multiple energy scales ranging from hundreds of MeV in binding energies to fractions of an MeV for low-lying collective excitations. As the limits of nuclear binding are approached near the neutron and proton drip lines, traditional shell structure starts to melt with an onset of deformation and an emergence of coexisting shapes. It is a long-standing challenge to describe this multiscale physics starting from nuclear forces with roots in quantum chromodynamics. Here, we achieve this within a unified and nonperturbative quantum many-body framework that captures both short- and long-range correlations starting from modern nucleon-nucleon and three-nucleon forces from chiral effective field theory. The short-range (dynamic) correlations which account for the bulk of the binding energy are included within a symmetry-breaking framework, while long-range (static) correlations (and fine details about the collective structure) are included by employing symmetry projection techniques. Our calculations accurately reproduce - within theoretical error bars - available experimental data for low-lying collective states and the electromagnetic quadrupole transitions in Ne20-30. In addition, we reveal coexisting spherical and deformed shapes in Ne30, which indicates the breakdown of the magic neutron number N=20 as the key nucleus O28 is approached, and we predict that the drip line nuclei Ne32,34 are strongly deformed and collective. By developing reduced-order models for symmetry-projected states, we perform a global sensitivity analysis and find that the subleading singlet S-wave contact and a pion-nucleon coupling strongly impact nuclear deformation in chiral effective field theory. The techniques developed in this work clarify how microscopic nuclear forces generate the multiscale physics of nuclei spanning collective phenomena as well as short-range correlations and allow one to capture emergent and dynamical phenomena in finite fermion systems such as atom clusters, molecules, and atomic nuclei.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 011028 |
| Journal | Physical Review X |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 2025 |
Funding
This work was supported (in part) by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research and Office of Nuclear Physics, Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program (SciDAC-5 NUCLEI); by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, under Grants No. DE-FG02-96ER40963 and No. DE-SC0024465, and by the Quantum Science Center, a National Quantum Information Science Research Center of the U.S. Department of Energy; by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant Agreement No. 758027); by the Swedish Research Council (Grants No. 2017-04234, No. 2020-05127, and No. 2021-04507). 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 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725, and resources provided by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) at Chalmers Centre for Computational Science and Engineering (C3SE) and the National Supercomputer Centre (NSC) partially funded by the Swedish Research Council through Grant Agreement No. 2018-05973. This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy.