Improved nuclear matter calculations from chiral low-momentum interactions

TL;DR

This paper improves nuclear matter calculations by incorporating a corrected three-nucleon force treatment from chiral effective field theory, achieving realistic saturation properties with better uncertainty estimates.

Contribution

It introduces an improved method for including three-nucleon forces in nuclear matter calculations, correcting a previous omission and enhancing the accuracy of the results.

Findings

Realistic saturation properties achieved

Larger uncertainty estimates due to cutoff and 3NF parametrization

Improved treatment of three-nucleon forces

Abstract

We present new nuclear matter calculations based on low-momentum interactions derived from chiral effective field theory potentials. The current calculations use an improved treatment of the three-nucleon force contribution that includes a corrected combinatorial factor beyond Hartree-Fock that was omitted in previous nuclear matter calculations. We find realistic saturation properties using parameters fit only to few-body data, but with larger uncertainty estimates from cutoff dependence and the 3NF parametrization than in previous calculations.