Accurate nuclear radii and binding energies from a chiral interaction

TL;DR

This paper develops a chiral nuclear interaction, NNLO_sat, optimized to reproduce scattering data and nuclear properties, enabling accurate predictions of binding energies and radii for nuclei up to calcium-40.

Contribution

It introduces the NNLO_sat interaction, optimized with multiple data types, and demonstrates its accuracy in predicting nuclear properties across a range of nuclei.

Findings

Accurately predicts binding energies and radii up to $^{40}$Ca.

Describes low-lying collective states in $^{16}$O and $^{40}$Ca.

Provides spectra in reasonable agreement with experiments.

Abstract

With the goal of developing predictive ab-initio capability for light and medium-mass nuclei, two-nucleon and three-nucleon forces from chiral effective field theory are optimized simultaneously to low-energy nucleon-nucleon scattering data, as well as binding energies and radii of few-nucleon systems and selected isotopes of carbon and oxygen. Coupled-cluster calculations based on this interaction, named NNLO$_{\rm sat}$, yield accurate binding energies and radii of nuclei up to $^{40}$Ca, and are consistent with the empirical saturation point of symmetric nuclear matter. In addition, the low-lying collective $J^\pi=3^-$ states in $^{16}$O and $^{40}$Ca are described accurately, while spectra for selected $p$- and $sd$-shell nuclei are in reasonable agreement with experiment.