Significance of chiral three-nucleon force contact terms for understanding of elastic nucleon-deuteron scattering

Abstract

We investigate the importance of the three-nucleon (3N) force contact terms in elastic nucleon-deuteron (Nd) scattering by applying the N${}^4$LO${}^{+}$ chiral semi-local momentum space (SMS) regularized nucleon-nucleon (NN) chiral potential supplemented by N${}^2$LO and all subleading N${}^4$LO three-nucleon force (3NF) contact terms. Strength parameters of the contact terms were obtained by least squares fitting of theoretical predictions to cross section and analyzing powers data at three energies of the impinging nucleon. Although the N${}^3$LO contributions to the 3N force were completely neglected, the results calculated with the contact terms multiplied by the fitted strength parameters yield an improved description of the elastic Nd scattering observables in a wide range of incoming nucleon energies below the pion production threshold.

43 pages, 13 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Chiral effective field theory and nuclear forces
• Improved chiral nucleon-nucleon potential up to next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order
• Subleading contributions to the chiral three-nucleon force I: long-range terms
• Light nuclei with semilocal momentum-space regularized chiral interactions up to third order
• Comprehensive investigation of the symmetric space-star configuration in the nucleon-deuteron breakup
• Perturbative treatment of three-nucleon force contact terms in three-nucleon Faddeev equations