Comparative study of three-nucleon potentials in nuclear matter

TL;DR

This paper compares different three-nucleon potentials to understand their effectiveness in modeling nuclear matter, revealing that none fully match empirical data but some approximate key properties.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of various local three-body potentials and discusses the impact of contact term treatment in chiral-inspired models.

Findings

None of the potentials fully explain empirical equilibrium density and binding energy.

Two potentials give reasonable saturation density values.

Ambiguity in contact term treatment affects model accuracy.

Abstract

A new generation of local three-body potentials providing an excellent description of the properties of light nuclei, as well as of the neutron-deuteron doublet scattering length, has been recently derived. We have performed a comparative analysis of the equations of state of both pure neutron matter and symmetric nuclear matter obtained using these models of three-nucleon forces. None of the considered potentials simultaneously explains the empirical equilibrium density and binding energy of symmetric nuclear matter. However, two of them provide reasonable values of the saturation density. The ambiguity concerning the treatment of the contact term of the chiral inspired potentials is discussed.