Neutron matter based on consistently evolved chiral three-nucleon interactions

TL;DR

This paper calculates the neutron matter equation of state using chiral effective field theory interactions that are evolved with the SRG, showing reduced dependence on the resolution scale when three-nucleon forces are included.

Contribution

It provides the first consistent SRG-evolved chiral interactions for neutron matter EOS, demonstrating reduced scale dependence and analyzing the effects of three-nucleon forces.

Findings

Inclusion of induced 3NF reduces EOS scale dependence.

Residual variation is comparable to many-body perturbation errors.

3NF contributions grow with decreasing SRG resolution, especially at low resolutions.

Abstract

We present the first results for the neutron matter equation of state (EOS) using nucleon-nucleon and three-nucleon chiral effective field theory interactions that are consistently evolved in the framework of the Similarity Renormalization Group (SRG). The dependence of the EOS on the SRG resolution scale is greatly reduced when induced three-nucleon forces (3NF) are included and the residual variation, which in part is from missing induced four-body interactions, is comparable to estimated many-body perturbation theory truncation errors. The relative growth with decreasing resolution of the 3NF contributions to the energy per neutron is of natural size, but it accelerates at the lowest resolutions where strong renormalization of the long-range 3NF matrix elements is also observed.