English

Improved structure of calcium isotopes from ab initio calculations

Nuclear Theory 2025-03-12 v2

Abstract

The in-medium similarity renormalization group (IMSRG) is a powerful and flexible many-body method to compute the structure of nuclei starting from nuclear forces. Recent developments have extended the IMSRG from its standard truncation at the normal-ordered two-body level, the IMSRG(2), to a precision approximation including normal-ordered three-body operators, the IMSRG(3)-N7N^7. This improvement provides a more precise solution to the many-body problem and makes it possible to quantify many-body uncertainties in IMSRG calculations. We explore the structure of 44,48,52^{44,48,52}Ca using the IMSRG(3)-N7N^7, focusing on understanding existing discrepancies of the IMSRG(2) to experimental results. We find a significantly better description of the first 2+2^+ excitation energy of 48^{48}Ca, improving the description of the shell closure at N=28N=28. At the same time, we find that the IMSRG(3)-N7N^7 corrections to charge radii do not resolve the systematic underprediction of the puzzling large charge radius difference between 52^{52}Ca and 48^{48}Ca. We present estimates of many-body uncertainties of IMSRG(2) calculations applicable also to other systems based on the size extensivity of the method.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2411.16014,
  title  = {Improved structure of calcium isotopes from ab initio calculations},
  author = {M. Heinz and T. Miyagi and S. R. Stroberg and A. Tichai and K. Hebeler and A. Schwenk},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.16014},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

15 pages, 8 figures, 1 table

R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:10:46.177Z