Systematics of binding energies and radii based on realistic two-nucleon plus phenomenological three-nucleon interactions

TL;DR

This paper explores how phenomenological three-nucleon interactions influence the systematics of nuclear ground-state energies and charge radii across the entire nuclear chart, demonstrating improved agreement with experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a method to incorporate simple three-nucleon contact interactions into nuclear models, enhancing the reproduction of energies and radii beyond two-body interactions alone.

Findings

Three-nucleon interactions improve energy and radius predictions.

The approach works across the full nuclear mass range.

Simplistic contact interactions suffice for accurate systematics.

Abstract

We investigate the influence of phenomenological three-nucleon interactions on the systematics of ground-state energies and charge radii throughout the whole nuclear mass range from 4-He to 208-Pb. The three-nucleon interactions supplement unitarily transformed two-body interactions constructed within the Unitary Correlation Operator Method or the Similarity Renormalization Group approach. To be able to address heavy nuclei as well, we treat the many-body problem in Hartree-Fock plus many-body perturbation theory, which is sufficient to assess the systematics of energies and radii, and limit ourselves to regularized three-body contact interactions. We show that even with such a simplistic three-nucleon interaction a simultaneous reproduction of the experimental ground-state energies and charge radii can be achieved, which is not possible with unitarily transformed two-body interactions alone.