Scale Dependence of Nucleon-Nucleon Potentials

TL;DR

This paper discusses how nucleon-nucleon potentials depend on the energy scale and compares phenomenological and chiral effective field theory models, highlighting their suitability for different nuclear physics applications.

Contribution

It provides an analysis of the scale dependence in nucleon-nucleon potentials and compares different models in the context of nuclear physics applications.

Findings

Phenomenological potentials are effective at describing high-energy scattering.

Chiral effective field theory potentials accurately describe deuteron momentum distributions.

Scale dependence is inherent in all potential models constrained by scattering data.

Abstract

The scale-dependence of the nucleon-nucleon interaction, which in recent years has been extensively analysed within the context of chiral effective field theory, is, in fact, inherent in any potential models constrained by a fit to scattering data. A comparison between a purely phenomenological potential and local interactions derived from chiral effective field theory suggests that--thanks to the ability to describe nucleon-nucleon scattering at higher energies, as well as the deuteron momentum distribution extracted from electro-disintegration data--phenomenological potentials are best suited for the description of nuclear dynamics at the scale relevant to neutron star matter.