Exploring the relationship between nuclear matter and finite nuclei with chiral two- and three-nucleon forces

Abstract

We address the connection between the saturating behavior of infinite nuclear matter and the description of finite nuclei based on state-of-the-art chiral two- and three-nucleon forces. We observe that chiral two- and three-nucleon interactions (at N2LO and at N3LO) which have been found to predict realistic binding energies and radii for a wide range of finite nuclei (from p-shell nuclei up to nickel isotopes) are unable to saturate infinite nuclear matter. On the other hand, it has been shown that, when the fits of the cD and cE couplings of the chiral three-nucleon interactions include the constraint of nuclear matter saturation in addition to, as is typically the case, the triton binding energy, medium-mass nuclei are underbound and their radii are sytematically too large. We discuss this apparent inconsistency and perform test calculations for various scenarios to shed light on the issue.

Accepted for publication in Physical Review C. 10 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Improved nuclear matter calculations from chiral low-momentum interactions
• Neutron matter at next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order in chiral effective field theory
• Subleading contributions to the chiral three-nucleon force I: long-range terms
• Neutron matter from chiral two- and three-nucleon calculations up to N${}^3$LO
• Efficient calculation of chiral three-nucleon forces up to N3LO for ab initio studies
• Chiral three-nucleon interaction and the carbon-14 dating beta decay
• Weinberg eigenvalues for chiral nucleon-nucleon interactions

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Analysis of the neutron matter equation of state and the symmetry energy up to fourth order of chiral effective field theory
• The relevance of pion-exchange contributions versus contact terms in the chiral effective field theory description of nucleon-nucleon scattering