Impact of correlations on nuclear binding energies

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how many-body correlations affect nuclear binding energies in Calcium and Chromium isotopes, demonstrating that symmetry-breaking mean-field approaches combined with polynomially-scaling expansion methods improve ab initio calculations for heavy nuclei.

Contribution

It introduces a pedagogical framework showing that symmetry-breaking mean-field states combined with polynomially-scaling expansions effectively incorporate correlations in heavy nuclei.

Findings

Mean-field approximation has limitations in Calcium isotopes.

Breaking rotational symmetry improves binding energy predictions in Chromium isotopes.

Polynomially-scaling expansion methods are optimal for extending ab initio calculations to heavy nuclei.

Abstract

A strong effort will be dedicated in the coming years to extend the reach of ab initio nuclear-structure calculations to heavy doubly open-shell nuclei. In order to do so, the most efficient strategies to incorporate dominant many-body correlations at play in such nuclei must be identified. With this motivation in mind, the present work pedagogically analyses the inclusion of many-body correlations and their impact on binding energies of Calcium and Chromium isotopes. Employing an empirically-optimal Hamiltonian built from chiral effective field theory, binding energies along both isotopic chains are studied via a hierarchy of approximations based on polynomially-scaling expansion many-body methods. The corresponding results are compared to experimental data and to those obtained via valence-space in-medium similarity renormalization group calculations at the normal-ordered two-body level that act as a reference in the present study. The spherical mean-field approximation is shown to display specific shortcomings in Ca isotopes that can be understood analytically and that are efficiently corrected via the consistent addition of low-order dynamical correlations on top of it. While the same setting cannot appropriately reproduce binding energies in doubly open-shell Cr isotopes, allowing the unperturbed mean-field state to break rotational symmetry permits to efficiently capture the static correlations responsible for the phenomenological differences observed between the two isotopic chains. Eventually, the present work demonstrates in a pedagogical way that polynomially-scaling expansion methods based on unperturbed states that possibly break (and restore) symmetries constitute an optimal route to extend ab initio calculations to heavy closed- and open-shell nuclei.