A global microscopic description of nucleon-nucleus scattering with quantified uncertainties

Abstract

We develop for the first time a microscopic global nucleon-nucleus optical potential with quantified uncertainties suitable for analyzing nuclear reaction experiments at next-generation rare-isotope beam facilities. Within the improved local density approximation and without any adjustable parameters, we begin by computing proton-nucleus and neutron-nucleus optical potentials from a set of five nuclear forces from chiral effective field theory for 1800 target nuclei in the mass range 12 $\le$ A $\le$ 242 for energies between 0 MeV $<$ E $\lesssim$ 150 MeV. We then parameterize a global optical potential for each chiral force that depends smoothly on the projectile energy as well as the target nucleus mass number and isospin asymmetry. Uncertainty bands for elastic scattering observables are generated from a full covariance analysis of the parameters entering in the description of our global optical potential and benchmarked against existing experimental data for stable target nuclei. Since our approach is purely microscopic, we anticipate a similar quality of the model for nucleon scattering on unstable isotopes.

References in corpus (13)

• Chiral effective field theory and nuclear forces
• Origin of the heavy elements in binary neutron-star mergers from a gravitational wave event
• Neutron matter at next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order in chiral effective field theory
• Local chiral effective field theory interactions and quantum Monte Carlo applications
• Chiral Effective Field Theory and the High-Density Nuclear Equation of State
• Novel technique for constraining r-process (n,$\gamma$) reaction rates
• Neutron matter from chiral two- and three-nucleon calculations up to N${}^3$LO
• Optical potential from first principles
• Direct comparison between Bayesian and frequentist uncertainty quantification for nuclear reactions
• Low Momentum Nucleon-Nucleon Interactions and Shell-Model Calculations
• Microscopic optical potentials for ${}^4$He scattering
• Density Matrix Expansion for Low-Momentum Interactions
• Exploring experimental conditions to reduce uncertainties in the optical potential

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Dense Nuclear Matter Equation of State from Heavy-Ion Collisions
• Optical potentials for the rare-isotope beam era
• Uncertainty-quantified phenomenological optical potentials for single-nucleon scattering
• Quantifying uncertainties due to optical potentials in one-neutron knockout reactions
• Ab initio nucleon-nucleus elastic scattering with chiral effective field theory uncertainties
• $\alpha$-nucleus optical potentials from chiral effective field theory $NN$ interactions
• Cross sections for neutron-induced reactions from surrogate data: revisiting the Weisskopf-Ewing approximation for $(n,n^{\prime })$ and $(n,2n)$ reactions
• Elastic proton scattering off non-zero spin nuclei
• Uncertainty Quantification in Breakup Reactions