Shell-model descriptions of mass 16-19 nuclei with chiral two- and three-nucleon interactions

TL;DR

This study uses chiral two- and three-nucleon interactions in shell-model calculations to improve the understanding of nuclei with mass 16-19, showing small but meaningful effects on energies and spectra.

Contribution

It introduces the use of in-medium three-nucleon potentials derived from chiral forces in shell-model calculations for nuclei with mass 16-19, demonstrating their impact on energies.

Findings

V_{3N}^{med} lowers ground-state energies, improving agreement with experiments.

Excitation spectra are minimally affected by V_{3N}^{med}.

V_{3N}^{med} is crucial for accurately predicting the binding energy of O-16.

Abstract

Shell-model calculations for several mass 16-19 nuclei are performed using the N$^3$LO two-nucleon potential $V_{2N}$ with and without the addition of an in-medium three-nucleon potential $V_{3N}^{med}$, which is a density-dependent effective two-nucleon potential recently derived from the leading-order chiral three-nucleon force $V_{3N}$ by Holt, Kaiser, and Weise. We first calculate the $V_{low-k}$ low-momentum interactions from $V_{2N}$ and $V_{3N}^{med}$. The shell-model effective interactions for both the $sd$ one-shell and $sdpf$ two-shell model spaces are then obtained from these low-momentum interactions using respectively the Lee-Suzuki and the recently developed Okamoto and Suzuki iteration methods. The effects of $V_{3N}^{med}$ to the low-lying states of $^{18}O$, $^{18}F$, $^{19}O$ and $^{19}F$ are generally small and attractive, mainly lowering the ground-state energies of these nuclei and making them in better agreements with experiments than those calculated with $V_{2N}$ alone. The excitation spectra of these nuclei are not significantly affected by $V_{3N}^{med}$. The low-lying spectra of these nuclei calculated with the $sd$ and $sdpf$ model spaces are closely similar to each other. Our shell-model calculations for $^{16}O$ indicate that the $V_{3N}^{med}$ interaction is important and desirable for the binding energy of this nucleus.