Nuclear effective field theory on the lattice

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that lattice chiral effective field theory accurately describes low-energy nuclear phenomena, including two-nucleon phase shifts and neutron matter energy, up to next-to-next-to-leading order, showing its potential for nuclear physics research.

Contribution

The study extends lattice chiral EFT calculations to NNLO, providing quantitative results for nuclear systems and validating the approach as a promising tool for low-energy nuclear physics.

Findings

Accurate two-nucleon phase-shifts obtained

Ground state energy ratio of dilute neutron matter matches predictions

Lattice EFT shows promise for nuclear many-body problems

Abstract

In the low-energy region far below the chiral symmetry breaking scale (which is of the order of 1 GeV) chiral perturbation theory provides a model-independent approach for quantitative description of nuclear processes. In the two- and more-nucleon sector perturbation theory is applicable only at the level of an effective potential which serves as input in the corresponding dynamical equation. To deal with the resulting many-body problem we put chiral effective field theory (EFT) on the lattice. Here we present the results of our lattice EFT study up to next-to-next-to-leading order in the chiral expansion. Accurate description of two-nucleon phase-shifts and ground state energy ratio of dilute neutron matter up to corrections of higher orders shows that lattice EFT is a promising tool for a quantitative description of low-energy few- and many-body systems.