A Minimal Nuclear Energy Density Functional

TL;DR

This paper introduces SeaLL1, a minimal nuclear energy density functional with only seven parameters, accurately modeling nuclear masses, radii, and separation energies, while incorporating constraints from neutron matter calculations.

Contribution

The paper presents SeaLL1, the simplest yet accurate nuclear energy density functional with seven parameters, integrating neutron matter constraints and enabling fine-tuning of nuclear excitations.

Findings

Achieves mean mass error of 0.97 MeV for even-even nuclei

Predicts charge radii with mean error of 0.022 fm

Incorporates neutron matter constraints from quantum Monte Carlo

Abstract

We present a minimal nuclear energy density functional (NEDF) called "SeaLL1" that has the smallest number of possible phenomenological parameters to date. SeaLL1 is defined by 7 significant phenomenological parameters, each related to a specific nuclear property. It describes the nuclear masses of even-even nuclei with a mean energy error of 0.97 MeV and a standard deviation 1.46 MeV, two-neutron and two-proton separation energies with r.m.s. errors of 0.69 MeV and 0.59 MeV respectively, and the charge radii of 345 even-even nuclei with a mean error $\epsilon_r=$0.022 fm and a standard deviation $\sigma_r=$0.025 fm. SeaLL1 incorporates constraints on the EoS of pure neutron matter from quantum Monte Carlo calculations with chiral effective field theory two-body (NN) interactions at N3LO level and three-body (NNN) interactions at the N2LO level. Two of the seven parameters are related to the saturation density and the energy per particle of the homogeneous symmetric nuclear matter, one is related to the nuclear surface tension, two are related to the symmetry energy and its density dependence, one is related to the strength of the spin-orbit interaction, and one is the coupling constant of the pairing interaction. We identify additional phenomenological parameters that have little effect on ground-state properties, but can be used to fine-tune features such as the Thomas-Reiche-Kuhn sum rule, the excitation energy of the giant dipole and Gamow-Teller resonances, the static dipole electric polarizability, and the neutron skin thickness.