Static and dynamic properties of atomic nuclei with high-resolution potentials

TL;DR

This paper uses high-resolution local nuclear forces and quantum Monte Carlo methods to accurately compute ground-state and dynamical properties of helium-4 and oxygen-16 nuclei, including energies, radii, and response functions.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed quantum Monte Carlo approach with high-resolution local forces to study both static and dynamic nuclear properties, enabling better modeling of electroweak responses.

Findings

Accurate binding energies and radii for $^4$He and $^{16}$O.

Analysis of momentum distributions and Euclidean response functions.

Benchmarking with hyperspherical harmonics for $^4$He.

Abstract

We compute ground-state and dynamical properties of $^4$He and $^{16}$O nuclei using as input high-resolution, phenomenological nucleon-nucleon and three-nucleon forces that are local in coordinate space. The nuclear Schr\"odinger equation for both nuclei is accurately solved employing the auxiliary-field diffusion Monte Carlo approach. For the $^4$He nucleus, detailed benchmarks are carried out with the hyperspherical harmonics method. In addition to presenting results for the binding energies and radii, we also analyze the momentum distributions of these nuclei and their Euclidean response function corresponding to the isoscalar density transition. The latter quantity is particularly relevant for lepton-nucleus scattering experiments, as it paves the way to quantum Monte Carlo calculations of electroweak response functions of $^{16}$O.