Few- and many-nucleon systems with semilocal coordinate-space regularized chiral two- and three-body forces

TL;DR

This paper performs comprehensive calculations of light nuclei and nucleon-deuteron scattering using advanced chiral effective field theory with semilocal regularization, demonstrating improved data agreement with three-nucleon forces.

Contribution

It provides a complete next-to-next-to-leading order calculation of light nuclei and scattering with a novel semilocal regularization scheme and reliable determination of three-nucleon force constants.

Findings

Three-nucleon force constants can be reliably fitted from triton binding energy and scattering data.

Including three-nucleon forces improves agreement with experimental data.

The approach achieves accurate descriptions up to mass number 16.

Abstract

We present a complete calculation of nucleon-deuteron scattering as well as ground and low-lying excited states of light nuclei in the mass range A=3-16 up through next-to-next-to-leading order in chiral effective field theory using semilocal coordinate-space regularized two- and three-nucleon forces. It is shown that both of the low-energy constants entering the three-nucleon force at this order can be reliably determined from the triton binding energy and the differential cross section minimum in elastic nucleon-deuteron scattering. The inclusion of the three-nucleon force is found to improve the agreement with the data for most of the considered observables.