The falsification of Chiral Nuclear Forces

TL;DR

This paper critically examines the limitations of chiral effective field theories in nuclear physics, revealing systematic discrepancies and questioning their predictive reliability due to regularization scheme dependence.

Contribution

It provides a systematic analysis of the shortcomings of chiral nuclear forces, highlighting issues with regularization dependence and short-distance dynamics.

Findings

Identifies discrepancies in zero energy NN scattering predictions.

Shows regularization scheme dependence affects predictive power.

Highlights limitations in peripheral scattering analyses.

Abstract

Predictive power in theoretical nuclear physics has been a major concern in the study of nuclear structure and reactions. The Effective Field Theory (EFT) based on chiral expansions provides a model independent hierarchy for many body forces at long distances but their predictive power may be undermined by the regularization scheme de- pendence induced by the counterterms and encoding the short distances dynamics which seem to dominate the uncertainties. We analyze several examples including zero energy NN scattering or perturbative counterterm-free peripheral scattering where one would ex- pect these methods to work best and unveil relevant systematic discrepancies when a fair comparison to the Granada-2013 NN-database and partial wave analysis is undertaken.