Structure ofA=10–13Nuclei with Two- Plus Three-Nucleon Interactions from Chiral Effective Field Theory

Abstract

Properties of finite nuclei are evaluated with two-nucleon (NN) and three-nucleon (NNN) interactions derived within chiral effective field theory. The nuclear Hamiltonian is fixed by properties of the A=2 system, except for two low-energy constants (LECs) that parametrize the short range NNN interaction, which we constrain with the A=3 binding energies. We investigate the sensitivity of 4He, 6Li, 10,11B, and 12,13C properties to the variation of the constrained LECs. We identify observables that are sensitive to this variation and find preferred values that give the best overall description. We demonstrate that the NNN interaction terms significantly improve the binding energies and spectra of mid-p-shell nuclei not just with the preferred choice of the LECs but even within a wide range of the constrained LECs. We find that a very high quality description of these nuclei requires further improvements to the chiral Hamiltonian.

Local three-nucleon interaction from chiral effective field theory

“…[18] and the local χEFT NNN interaction employed in Ref. [14] differ to some extent in their description of mid-p-shell nuclei with the latter giving results in a better agreement with experiment. Therefore, it is important to pay attention to the details of the NNN interaction and test different possibilities.…”

“…, it is straightforward to verify that in the limit Λ → ∞ both expressions (14) and (15) lead to the same result. For completeness, let us note that in Ref.…”

“…[14] differs in two aspects from the first NCSM application of the χEFT NN+NNN interactions in Ref. [18], which presents a detailed investigation of 7 Li.…”

“…[14,17] and present its matrix elements in the three-nucleon basis. Technical details of dealing with NNN interactions were investigated in many papers [28,29,30,31,32,33,34].…”

“…In a recent work [14], the presently available NN potential at N 3 LO [13] and the NNN interaction at N 2 LO [10,11] have been applied to the calculation of various properties of s-and p-shell nuclei, using the ab initio no-core shell model (NCSM) [15,16], up to now the only approach able to handle the nonlocal χEFT NN potentials for systems beyond A = 4. In that study, a preferred choice of the two NNN LECs, c D and c E , was found and the fundamental importance of the χEFT NNN interaction was demonstrated for reproducing the structure of mid-p-shell nuclei.…”