English

Quantum Monte Carlo Calculations of Light Nuclei Using Chiral Potentials

Nuclear Theory 2014-11-11 v2 Nuclear Experiment

Abstract

We present the first Green's function Monte Carlo calculations of light nuclei with nuclear interactions derived from chiral effective field theory up to next-to-next-to-leading order. Up to this order, the interactions can be constructed in a local form and are therefore amenable to quantum Monte Carlo calculations. We demonstrate a systematic improvement with each order for the binding energies of A=3A=3 and A=4A=4 systems. We also carry out the first few-body tests to study perturbative expansions of chiral potentials at different orders, finding that higher-order corrections are more perturbative for softer interactions. Our results confirm the necessity of a three-body force for correct reproduction of experimental binding energies and radii, and pave the way for studying few- and many-nucleon systems using quantum Monte Carlo methods with chiral interactions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1406.2787,
  title  = {Quantum Monte Carlo Calculations of Light Nuclei Using Chiral Potentials},
  author = {J. E. Lynn and J. Carlson and E. Epelbaum and S. Gandolfi and A. Gezerlis and A. Schwenk},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1406.2787},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

5 pages, 3 figures, 4 tables. Updated references. Cosmetic changes to figures, tables, and equations; added a sentence clarifying the correspondence between our real-space cutoffs and momentum-space cutoffs. Other sentences were reworded for clarity