Implications of Efimov physics for the description of three and four nucleons in chiral effective field theory

Abstract

In chiral effective field theory the leading order (LO) nucleon-nucleon potential includes two contact terms, in the two spin channels $S=0,1$, and the one-pion-exchange potential. When the pion degrees of freedom are integrated out, as in the pionless effective field theory, the LO potential includes two contact terms only. In the three-nucleon system, the pionless theory includes a three-nucleon contact term interaction at LO whereas the chiral effective theory does not. Accordingly arbitrary differences could be observed in the LO description of three- and four-nucleon binding energies. We analyze the two theories at LO and conclude that a three-nucleon contact term is necessary at this order in both theories. In turn this implies that subleading three-nucleon contact terms should be promoted to lower orders. Furthermore this analysis shows that one single low energy constant might be sufficient to explain the large values of the singlet and triplet scattering lengths.

5 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Subleading contributions to the chiral three-nucleon force I: long-range terms
• Peripheral nucleon-nucleon scattering at fifth order of chiral perturbation theory
• Power Counting of Contact-Range Currents in Effective Field Theory
• Effective Field Theory for Few-Boson Systems
• Three-nucleon bound states and the Wigner-SU(4) limit

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Nuclear Forces for Precision Nuclear Physics -- a collection of perspectives
• Efimov Physics and Connections to Nuclear Physics
• Two- and three-nucleon contact interactions and ground-state energies of light- and medium-mass nuclei
• A Comprehensive Study of the Three- and Four-Neutron Systems at Low Energies
• Nuclear Effective Field Theories: Reverberations of the early days
• Effect of the N3LO three-nucleon contact interaction on p-d scattering observables
• Bayesian Analysis of $\chi$EFT at Leading Order in a Modified Weinberg Power Counting Approach
• Neutron-${}^{19}\mathrm{C}$ scattering: Towards including realistic interactions
• Weinberg and few-nucleon forces
• Gaussian characterization of two-neutron halo nuclei