English

Coulomb Corrections to Three-Nucleon Moments

Nuclear Theory 2026-05-20 v1

Abstract

The Helium-3 (3He{}^3\mathrm{He}) magnetic moment and Gamow-Teller (GT) matrix element in triton (3H{}^3\mathrm{H}) β\beta-decay are calculated in pionless effective field theory (EFT(/ ⁣ ⁣ ⁣π)\mathrm{EFT}(/\!\!\!\pi)) to next-to-leading order (NLO). Coulomb corrections are included perturbatively to O(α)\mathcal{O}(\alpha) in this framework and should naively be αMn/p ⁣ ⁣ ⁣8%\alpha M_n/p^*\!\!\sim\!8\% corrections, where p ⁣ ⁣ ⁣88.5p^*\!\!\sim\!88.5 MeV is related to the three-nucleon binding momentum. Fitting the two-nucleon iso-vector magnetic current low-energy constant (LEC), L1L_1, to the 3H{}^3\mathrm{H} magnetic moment and the two-nucleon iso-scalar magnetic current LEC, L2L_2, to the deuteron magnetic moment we find the NLO 3He{}^3\mathrm{He} magnetic moment in units of nuclear magnetons is -2.130 and the surprisingly small O(α)\mathcal{O}(\alpha) correction is 0.00335,  ⁣0.18%\approx\!0.18\% of the LO EFT(/ ⁣ ⁣ ⁣π)\mathrm{EFT}(/\!\!\!\pi) prediction. The leading-order (LO) GT matrix element for 3H{}^3\mathrm{H} β\beta-decay is 0.9806 while again it has a surprisingly small O(α)\mathcal{O}(\alpha) Coulomb correction of 0.000740-0.000740,  ⁣0.08%\approx\!0.08\% of the LO EFT(/ ⁣ ⁣ ⁣π)\mathrm{EFT}(/\!\!\!\pi) prediction. At NLO we calculate the GT matrix element of 3H{}^3\mathrm{H} β\beta-decay, including the O(α)\mathcal{O}(\alpha) Coulomb correction, in terms of the two-nucleon axial current LEC l1,Al_{1,A}. Fitting l1,Al_{1,A} to the 3H{}^3\mathrm{H} half-life we make a prediction for the proton-proton fusion reduced matrix element of Λ(0)=2.776(331)\Lambda(0)=2.776(331). Finally, we attempt to explain the unusually small size of the O(α)\mathcal{O}(\alpha) corrections by investigating the Wigner-SU(4) expansion of these observables.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.19062,
  title  = {Coulomb Corrections to Three-Nucleon Moments},
  author = {Ha S. Nguyen and Jared Vanasse},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.19062},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

45 pages, 6 figures