Ab initio calculations of parity-violating electron scattering off ${}^{48}$Ca and ${}^{208}$Pb

Abstract

Parity-violating electron scattering off nuclei both serves as a low-energy precision probe to test electroweak interactions and allows one to access neutron distributions inside nuclei. It has implications for strong interactions in dense neutron-rich environments, also providing constraints for the properties of matter in neutron stars. Precision measurements are available for ${}^{48}$Ca and ${}^{208}$Pb by the CREX and PREX collaborations, respectively, and their interpretation requires advanced nuclear-structure calculations to draw firm conclusions. We perform the first ab initio calculations of the parity-violating asymmetry $A_{\text{PV}}$ based on nuclear forces from chiral effective field theory, fully including corrections due to Coulomb distortion effects. Based on these results, we critically reexamine correlation analyses employed to infer weak radii and quantify the resulting tensions between ab initio and experimental results. We find that ab initio calculations prefer values of $A_{\text{PV}}$ slightly smaller and larger than observed for ${}^{48}$Ca and ${}^{208}$Pb, respectively, with a global significance of $1.9\ddot{I}ƒ$. Using theoretically consistent inputs for charge and weak densities, we infer from the experimental $A_{\text{PV}}$ a neutron skin of ${}^{208}$Pb of $R_n-R_p=0.187(25)(18)$ fm, substantially smaller than that reported by PREX II.

14 pages, 8 figures; python notebook with charge distribution for ${}^{208}$Pb included as supplementary material