The neutron polaron as a constraint on nuclear density functionals

Abstract

We study the energy of an impurity (polaron) that interacts strongly in a sea of fermions when the effective range of the impurity-fermion interaction becomes important, thereby mapping the Fermi polaron of condensed matter physics and ultracold atoms to strongly interacting neutrons. We present Quantum Monte Carlo results for this neutron polaron, and compare these with effective field theory calculations that also include contributions beyond the effective range. We show that state-of-the-art nuclear density functionals vary substantially and generally underestimate the neutron polaron energy. Our results thus provide constraints for adjusting the time-odd components of nuclear density functionals to better characterize polarized systems.

5 pages, 3 figures; v2 corresponds to the published version

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Cited by in corpus (21)

• Neutron Matter from Low to High Density
• Diagrammatic Monte Carlo study of the acoustic and the BEC polaron
• Isovector properties of the Gogny interaction
• Static Response of Neutron Matter
• Effective density functionals beyond mean field
• Polaron Problems in Ultracold Atoms: Role of a Fermi Sea across Different Spatial Dimensions and Quantum Fluctuations of a Bose Medium
• Ab initio and phenomenological studies of the static response of neutron matter
• Constraining the nuclear energy density functional with quantum Monte Carlo calculations
• Non-perturbative Extraction of the Effective Mass in Neutron Matter
• To which densities is spin-polarized neutron matter a weakly interacting Fermi gas?
• Beyond--mean--field effective masses in the nuclear Fermi liquid from axial breathing modes
• Fermi polaron in low-density spin-polarized neutron matter
• Satisfying the compressibility sum rule in neutron matter
• Polaronic Proton and Diproton Clustering in Neutron-Rich Matter
• Perturbed nuclear matter studied within Density Functional Theory with a finite number of particles
• Momentum-dependent quasiparticle properties of the Fermi polaron from the functional renormalization group
• The Gor'kov and Melik-Barkhudarov correction to an imbalanced Fermi gas in the presence of impurities
• Polaronic neutron in dilute alpha matter: A $p$-wave Bose polaron
• Skyrme-based extrapolation for the static response of neutron matter
• Neutron matter at the interface(s): static response and effective mass
• Ab initio study of the neutron and Fermi polarons on the lattice