Constraining the nuclear energy density functional with quantum Monte Carlo calculations

Abstract

We study the problem of an impurity in fully polarized (spin-up) low density neutron matter with the help of an accurate quantum Monte Carlo method in conjunction with a realistic nucleon-nucleon interaction derived from chiral effective field theory at next-to-next-to-leading-order. Our calculations show that the behavior of the proton spin-down impurity is very similar to that of a polaron in a fully polarized unitary Fermi gas. We show that our results can be used to put tight constraints on the time-odd parts of the energy density functional, independent of the time-even parts, in the density regime relevant to neutron-rich nuclei and compact astrophysical objects such as neutron stars and supernovae.

5 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (9)

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• Further explorations of Skyrme-Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov mass formulas. XII: Stiffness and stability of neutron-star matter
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• Fermi-Polaron: Diagrammatic Monte Carlo for Divergent Sign-Alternating Series
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• Ultra-cold Polarized Fermi Gases
• A new Skyrme interaction with improved spin-isospin properties
• Quantum Monte Carlo calculations of neutron matter with non-local chiral interactions
• Number-conserving theory of nuclear pairing gaps: a global assessment

Cited by in corpus (19)

• The equation of state for dense nucleonic matter from a metamodeling. I. Foundational aspects
• Isovector properties of the Gogny interaction
• Skyrme-Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov mass models on a 3D mesh: II. Time-reversal symmetry breaking
• Static Response of Neutron Matter
• Effective density functionals beyond mean field
• Microscopically constrained mean field models from chiral nuclear thermodynamics
• Ab initio and phenomenological studies of the static response of neutron matter
• Non-perturbative Extraction of the Effective Mass in Neutron Matter
• Confronting a set of Skyrme and ${\chi }_{EFT}$ predictions for the crust of neutron stars
• Tensor Fermi liquid parameters in nuclear matter from chiral effective field theory
• Beyond--mean--field effective masses in the nuclear Fermi liquid from axial breathing modes
• Quantum Monte Carlo in Configuration Space with Three-Nucleon Forces
• Fermi polaron in low-density spin-polarized neutron matter
• Satisfying the compressibility sum rule in neutron matter
• Towards a power counting in nuclear energy-density-functional theories through a perturbative analysis
• Neutron matter at the interface(s): static response and effective mass
• Skyrme-based extrapolation for the static response of neutron matter
• The Gor'kov and Melik-Barkhudarov correction to an imbalanced Fermi gas in the presence of impurities
• Ab initio study of the neutron and Fermi polarons on the lattice