Can Long-Range Nuclear Properties Be Influenced By Short Range Interactions? A chiral dynamics estimate

TL;DR

This paper uses chiral dynamics to estimate the impact of short-range neutron-proton correlations on nuclear properties, showing they can significantly influence long-range nuclear observables like charge radii.

Contribution

It provides a chiral dynamics-based estimate of short-range correlations' effects on nuclear properties, linking microscopic interactions to macroscopic observables.

Findings

Chiral dynamics predicts about 20% of nucleons are in short-range correlated pairs.

Short-range correlations can significantly affect calculations of nuclear charge radii.

The study demonstrates a connection between short-range interactions and long-range nuclear properties.

Abstract

Recent experiments and many-body calculations indicate that approximately 20\% of the nucleons in medium and heavy nuclei ($A\geq12$) are part of short-range correlated (SRC) primarily neutron-proton ($np$) pairs. We find that using chiral dynamics to account for the formation of $np$ pairs due to the effects of iterated and irreducible two-pion exchange leads to values consistent with the 20\% level. We further apply chiral dynamics to study how these correlations influence the calculations of nuclear charge radii, that traditionally truncate their effect, to find that they are capable of introducing non-negligible effects.