Electromagnetic reactions on light nuclei using chiral effective theory

TL;DR

This paper discusses the application of chiral effective theory to calculate electromagnetic reactions in light nuclei, providing predictions for scattering processes that can inform understanding of nucleon structure.

Contribution

It extends chiral perturbation theory to the few-nucleon sector and offers new predictions for electromagnetic reactions in light nuclei.

Findings

Predictions for electron-deuteron scattering

Predictions for elastic Compton scattering on deuterium and Helium-3

Potential to extract neutron polarizabilities from upcoming data

Abstract

I describe the use of chiral effective theory (ChiET) to compute electromagnetic reactions in two- and three-nucleon systems. I first explain how chiral perturbation theory can be extended to the few-nucleon sector. I then explain the predictions of the resulting ChiET for electron-deuteron scattering, and how they will be tested by forthcoming data from BLAST. I conclude by displaying predictions for elastic Compton scattering from deuterium and Helium-3 nuclei. These computations, in concert with future data from MAX-Lab and HIGS, should give significant new information on neutron polarizabilities, and hence yield insight into the structure of the nucleon.