Ab Initio study of neutron drops with chiral Hamiltonians

TL;DR

This paper performs ab initio calculations of neutron drops in a harmonic trap using chiral interactions, comparing results across methods and Hamiltonians to understand nuclear many-body effects.

Contribution

It provides comprehensive ab initio results for neutron drops with chiral Hamiltonians using multiple computational methods and compares these with existing Monte Carlo data.

Findings

Binding energies depend on the chosen Hamiltonian.

Results vary between no-core shell model and coupled-cluster approaches.

Comparison with Monte Carlo highlights model sensitivities.

Abstract

We report ab initio calculations for neutron drops in a 10 MeV external harmonic-oscillator trap using chiral nucleon-nucleon plus three-nucleon interactions. We present total binding energies, internal energies, radii and odd-even energy differences for neutron numbers N = 2 - 18 using the no-core shell model with and without importance truncation. Furthermore, we present total binding energies for N = 8, 16, 20, 28, 40, 50 obtained in a coupled-cluster approach. Comparisons with Green's Function Monte Carlo results, where available, using Argonne v8' with three-nucleon interactions reveal important dependences on the chosen Hamiltonian.