Nuclear Energy Density Functional for KIDS

TL;DR

This paper introduces the KIDS density functional for nuclear physics, derived from theoretical considerations and applied to finite nuclei to compute energies and radii, advancing nuclear DFT modeling.

Contribution

It develops the KIDS functional based on analytical density dependence and demonstrates its application to finite nuclei for the first time.

Findings

Accurate energies and radii for selected oxygen and calcium isotopes.

Validation of the KIDS functional for finite nuclei.

Potential for improved nuclear structure predictions.

Abstract

The density functional theory (DFT) is based on the existence and uniqueness of a universal functional $E[\rho]$, which determines the dependence of the total energy on single-particle density distributions. However, DFT says nothing about the form of the functional. Our strategy is to first look at what we know, from independent considerations, about the analytical density dependence of the energy of nuclear matter and then, for practical applications, to obtain an appropriate density-dependent effective interaction by reverse engineering. In a previous work on homogeneous matter, we identified the most essential terms to include in our "KIDS" functional, named after the early-stage participating institutes. We now present first results for finite nuclei, namely the energies and radii of $^{16,28}$O, $^{40,60}$Ca.