Nuclear matter properties with nucleon-nucleon forces up to fifth order in the chiral expansion

TL;DR

This paper investigates nuclear matter properties using advanced nucleon-nucleon forces up to fifth order in chiral effective field theory, analyzing convergence, regulator dependence, and resulting saturation properties.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of nuclear matter equations of state with fifth-order chiral forces, including convergence patterns and uncertainty estimates, which is novel at this order.

Findings

Fifth-order chiral potentials produce saturation properties similar to phenomenological potentials.

The symmetry energy is robust across different chiral orders and regulators.

Convergence pattern and regulator dependence are systematically analyzed.

Abstract

The properties of nuclear matter are studied using state-of-the-art nucleon-nucleon forces up to fifth order in chiral effective field theory. The equations of state of symmetric nuclear matter and pure neutron matter are calculated in the framework of the Brueckner-Hartree-Fock theory. We discuss in detail the convergence pattern of the chiral expansion and the regulator dependence of the calculated equations of state and provide an estimation of the truncation uncertainty. For all employed values of the regulator, the fifth-order chiral two-nucleon potential is found to generate nuclear saturation properties similar to the available phenomenological high precision potentials. We also extract the symmetry energy of nuclear matter, which is shown to be quite robust with respect to the chiral order and the value of the regulator.