Pion-less effective field theory for atomic nuclei and lattice nuclei

TL;DR

This paper applies pionless effective field theory at NLO to compute properties of medium-mass nuclei $^{16}$O and $^{40}$Ca, demonstrating the method's convergence and ability to predict binding energies at different pion masses.

Contribution

It introduces a novel implementation of pionless EFT for medium-mass nuclei using a harmonic oscillator basis, achieving rapid convergence and binding energy predictions.

Findings

$^{16}$O and $^{40}$Ca are bound at NLO.

Binding energies are 9-10 MeV at physical pion mass.

Binding energies are 30-40 MeV at unphysical pion mass.

Abstract

We compute the medium-mass nuclei $^{16}$O and $^{40}$Ca using pionless effective field theory (EFT) at next-to-leading order (NLO). The low-energy coefficients of the EFT Hamiltonian are adjusted to experimantal data for nuclei with mass numbers $A=2$ and $3$, or alternatively to results from lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD) at an unphysical pion mass of 806 MeV. The EFT is implemented through a discrete variable representation in the harmonic oscillator basis. This approach ensures rapid convergence with respect to the size of the model space and facilitates the computation of medium-mass nuclei. At NLO the nuclei $^{16}$O and $^{40}$Ca are bound with respect to decay into alpha particles. Binding energies per nucleon are 9-10 MeV and 30-40 MeV at pion masses of 140 MeV and 806 MeV, respectively.