Double-folding potentials from chiral effective field theory

TL;DR

This paper develops and benchmarks a new method for calculating nucleus-nucleus potentials using chiral effective field theory, providing insights into nuclear reactions relevant for astrophysics.

Contribution

First determination of double-folding potentials from chiral effective field theory at multiple orders, with new soft local interactions and applications to scattering and fusion.

Findings

Accurate elastic scattering cross sections up to 700 MeV

Astrophysical S-factor for fusion reaction

Benchmarking of chiral potentials in nuclear reactions

Abstract

The determination of nucleus-nucleus potentials is important not only to describe the properties of the colliding system, but also to extract nuclear-structure information and for modelling nuclear reactions for astrophysics. We present the first determination of double-folding potentials based on chiral effective field theory at leading, next-to-leading, and next-to-next-to-leading order. To this end, we construct new soft local chiral effective field theory interactions. We benchmark this approach in the $^{16}$O-$^{16}$O system, and present results for cross sections computed for elastic scattering up to 700 MeV in energy, as well as for the astrophysical $S$-factor of the fusion reaction.