Quantum Monte Carlo Calculations of Light Nuclei Using Chiral Potentials

Abstract

We present the first Green's function Monte Carlo calculations of light nuclei with nuclear interactions derived from chiral effective field theory up to next-to-next-to-leading order. Up to this order, the interactions can be constructed in a local form and are therefore amenable to quantum Monte Carlo calculations. We demonstrate a systematic improvement with each order for the binding energies of $A=3$ and $A=4$ systems. We also carry out the first few-body tests to study perturbative expansions of chiral potentials at different orders, finding that higher-order corrections are more perturbative for softer interactions. Our results confirm the necessity of a three-body force for correct reproduction of experimental binding energies and radii, and pave the way for studying few- and many-nucleon systems using quantum Monte Carlo methods with chiral interactions.

5 pages, 3 figures, 4 tables. Updated references. Cosmetic changes to figures, tables, and equations; added a sentence clarifying the correspondence between our real-space cutoffs and momentum-space cutoffs. Other sentences were reworded for clarity

References in corpus (4)

• Chiral effective field theory and nuclear forces
• Improved nuclear matter calculations from chiral low-momentum interactions
• In-Medium Similarity Renormalization Group with Chiral Two- Plus Three-Nucleon Interactions
• Real-Space Imaginary-Time Propagators for Non-Local Nucleon-Nucleon Potentials

Cited by in corpus (13)

• Local chiral effective field theory interactions and quantum Monte Carlo applications
• Quantum Monte Carlo calculations of light nuclei with local chiral two- and three-nucleon interactions
• Neutrinoless double beta decay matrix elements in light nuclei
• From the lightest nuclei to the equation of state of asymmetric nuclear matter with realistic nuclear interactions
• Spectrum of shear modes in the neutron-star crust: Estimating the nuclear-physics uncertainties
• Analyzing the Fierz Rearrangement Freedom for Local Chiral Two-Nucleon Potentials
• Weinberg eigenvalues for chiral nucleon-nucleon interactions
• Nuclear Reactions from Lattice QCD
• Optical Potentials Derived from Nucleon-Nucleon Chiral Potentials at N4LO
• Dispersion relations applied to double-folding potentials from chiral EFT
• Trapped two-nucleon system in energy-dependent effective field theory
• Nucleon-nucleon potentials in phase-space representation
• Formal Developments for Lattice QCD with Applications to Hadronic Systems