English

The neutron dripline in calcium isotopes from a chiral interaction

Nuclear Theory 2025-12-15 v1

Abstract

Interactions derived from effective field theories of quantum chromodynamics have thus far failed to bind calcium nuclei beyond neutron number N=40N=40, while nuclear density functionals typically place the neutron dripline near 70^{70}Ca, at N=50N=50. We present the chiral interaction N3^3LOTexas_{\rm Texas}, a combination of two- and three-nucleon potentials at fourth and third chiral order, respectively, with low-energy constants optimized using emulator-accelerated fits to few- and many-body data. This interaction accurately reproduces binding energies and charge radii of key nuclei with mass number A=3A=3 to 208208, important excited states, and nuclear matter near saturation. Using ab-initio methods, we find that the calcium two-neutron dripline extends to 71^{71}Ca.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.11723,
  title  = {The neutron dripline in calcium isotopes from a chiral interaction},
  author = {B. S. Hu and A. Ekström and C. Forssén and G. Hagen and W. G. Jiang and T. Miyagi and T. Papenbrock},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.11723},
  year   = {2025}
}