Computing the dipole polarizability of 48Ca with increased precision

TL;DR

This study enhances the precision of calculating the electric dipole polarizability of 48Ca by including advanced many-body correlations using coupled-cluster methods and benchmarking against other nuclear models.

Contribution

It introduces the inclusion of leading-order 3p-3h excitations in coupled-cluster calculations for 48Ca, improving agreement with experimental data.

Findings

3p-3h excitations have a small effect for one interaction but are significant for another.

Inclusion of these correlations improves the match with experimental polarizability measurements.

Benchmarking confirms the validity of the coupled-cluster approach with advanced correlations.

Abstract

We compute the electric dipole polarizability of 48Ca with an increased precision by including more correlations than in previous studies. Employing the coupled-cluster method we go beyond singles and doubles excitations and include leading-order three-particle-three-hole (3p-3h) excitations for the ground state, excited states, and the similarity transformed operator. We study electromagnetic sum rules, such as the bremsstrahlung sum rule m_0 and the polarizability sum rule alpha_D using interactions from chiral effective field theory. To gauge the quality of our coupled-cluster approximations we perform several benchmarks with the effective interaction hyperspherical harmonics approach in 4He and with self consistent Green's function in 16O. We compute the dipole polarizability of 48Ca employing the chiral interaction N2LOsat [Ekstroem et al., Phys. Rev. C 91, 051301 (2015)] and the 1.8/2.0 (EM) [Hebeler et al., Phys. Rev. C 83, 031301 (2011)]. We find that the effect of 3p-3h excitations in the ground state is small for 1.8/2.0 (EM) but non-negligible for N2LOsat. The addition of these new correlations allows us to improve the precision of our 48Ca calculations and reconcile the recently reported discrepancy between coupled-cluster results based on these interactions and the experimentally determined alpha_D from proton inelastic scattering in 48Ca [Birkhan et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 252501 (2017)]. For the computation of electromagnetic and polarizability sum rules, the inclusion of leading-order 3p-3h excitations in the ground state is important, while less so for the excited states and the similarity-transformed dipole operator.