Local chiral potentials and the structure of light nuclei

TL;DR

This paper develops fully local chiral nucleon-nucleon potentials and applies them to calculate properties of light nuclei using hyperspherical-harmonics and quantum Monte Carlo methods.

Contribution

It introduces local versions of minimally non-local chiral potentials and demonstrates their use in ab initio nuclear structure calculations.

Findings

Accurate descriptions of light nuclei ground and excited states.

Effective local potentials fitted to experimental scattering data.

Potential regularization effects studied through cutoff variations.

Abstract

We present fully local versions of the minimally non-local nucleon-nucleon potentials constructed in a previous paper [M.\ Piarulli {\it et al.}, Phys.\ Rev.\ C {\bf 91}, 024003 (2015)], and use them in hypersperical-harmonics and quantum Monte Carlo calculations of ground and excited states of $^3$H, $^3$He, $^4$He, $^6$He, and $^6$Li nuclei. The long-range part of these local potentials includes one- and two-pion exchange contributions without and with $\Delta$-isobars in the intermediate states up to order $Q^3$ ($Q$ denotes generically the low momentum scale) in the chiral expansion, while the short-range part consists of contact interactions up to order $Q^4$. The low-energy constants multiplying these contact interactions are fitted to the 2013 Granada database in two different ranges of laboratory energies, either 0--125 MeV or 0--200 MeV, and to the deuteron binding energy and $nn$ singlet scattering length. Fits to these data are performed for three models characterized by long- and short-range cutoffs, $R_{\rm L}$ and $R_{\rm S}$ respectively, ranging from $(R_{\rm L},R_{\rm S})=(1.2,0.8)$ fm down to $(0.8,0.6)$ fm. The long-range (short-range) cutoff regularizes the one- and two-pion exchange (contact) part of the potential.