Lattice Nuclear Force

TL;DR

This paper derives a non-local, energy-independent potential for baryon-baryon interactions from lattice QCD, revealing detailed features of nucleon-nucleon and octet-baryon forces, including the repulsive core and tensor components.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to extract non-local baryon-baryon potentials from lattice QCD and applies it to study nucleon-nucleon and octet-baryon interactions.

Findings

Central potential has a repulsive core and an attractive well.

Tensor potential exhibits intermediate and long-range attraction.

Interactions among octet-baryons suggest origins of the repulsive core and potential H-dibaryon existence.

Abstract

We derive an energy-independent and non-local potential for the baryon-baryon interaction from the Nambu-Bethe-Salpeter amplitude on the lattice. The method is applied to the nucleon-nucleon interactions with the (2+1)-flavor lattice QCD simulations. The central and tensor potentials are obtained as leading order terms of the velocity expansion of the non-local potential: The central potential has a repulsive core surrounded by an attractive well, while the tensor potential has intermediate and long range attractions. Validity of the velocity expansions tested by the nucleon-nucleon interaction with finite relative momentum. Interactions among octet-baryons in the flavor SU(3) limit are also studied in full QCD simulations to unravel the origin of the repulsive core and the possible existence of $H$-dibaryon.