The Form of the Effective Interaction in Harmonic-Oscillator-Based Effective Theory

TL;DR

This paper develops a systematic, convergent method for constructing effective interactions in harmonic-oscillator-based theories, accurately reproducing properties of nuclear systems with minimal energy dependence.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining contact-gradient expansion with exact kinetic energy summation, reducing state dependence and improving convergence in nuclear effective interactions.

Findings

Achieves 0.01% accuracy in reproducing Heff properties at N3LO.

Demonstrates systematic convergence of the effective interaction expansion.

Shows that state dependence is largely captured by a single parameter, kappa.

Abstract

I explore the form of the effective interaction in harmonic-oscillator-based effective theory (HOBET) in next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order (N3LO). As the included space in a HOBET (as in the shell model) is defined by the oscillator energy, both long-distance (low-momentum) and short-distance (high-momentum) degrees of freedom reside in the high-energy excluded space. A HOBET effective interaction is developed in which a short-range contact-gradient expansion is combined with an exact summation of the relative kinetic energy. By this means the very strong coupling of the included (P) and excluded (Q) spaces by the kinetic energy is removed. One finds that the interplay of QT and QV is governed by a single parameter kappa, the ratio of an observable, the binding energy |E|, to a parameter in the effective theory, the oscillator energy. Once the functional dependence on kappa is identified, the remaining order-by-order subtraction of the short-range physics residing in Q becomes systematic and rapidly converging. Numerical calculations are used to demonstrate how well the resulting expansion reproduces the running of Heff from high scales to a typical shell-model scale of 8 hbar omega. At N3LO various global properties of Heff are reproduced to a typical accuracy of 0.01%, or about 1 keV. The state-dependence of the effective interaction has been a troubling problem in nuclear physics, and is embodied in the energy dependence of Heff(|E|) in the Bloch-Horowitz formalism. It is shown that almost all of this state dependence is also extracted in the procedures followed here, isolated in the analytic dependence of Heff on kappa. Thus there exists a simple, Hermitian Heff that can be use in spectral calculations.