Correlations among neutron-proton and neutron-deuteron elastic scattering observables

TL;DR

This study investigates correlations among neutron-proton and neutron-deuteron elastic scattering observables using advanced nucleon-nucleon interaction models, revealing energy- and angle-dependent correlations that can inform force parameter fitting.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic analysis of correlations between two- and three-nucleon scattering observables using statistically generated potential models.

Findings

Most observables are uncorrelated, with notable exceptions.

Strong correlations depend on energy and scattering angle.

Results aid in refining nucleon interaction models.

Abstract

We employ two models of the nucleon-nucleon force: the OPE-Gaussian as well as the chiral N4LO and N4LO+ interactions with semilocal regularization in momentum space to study correlations among two-nucleon and three-nucleon elastic scattering observables. These models contain a number of free parameters whose values and covariance matrices are evaluated from a fit to the two-nucleon data. Such detailed knowledge of parameters allows us to create, using various sets of statistically generated parameters, numerous versions of these potentials and next apply them to two- and three-nucleon scattering to make predictions of various observables at the reaction energies up to 200 MeV. This permits a systematic analysis of correlations among two-nucleon and three-nucleon observables, basing on a relatively big sample of predictions. We found that most observables in neutron-proton and neutron-deuteron systems are uncorrelated, but there are exceptions revealing strong correlations, which depend on the reaction energy and scattering angle. This information may be useful for precise fixing free parameters of two-nucleon and three-nucleon forces and for understanding dependencies and correlations between potential parameters and observables.