Charged Particle Scattering in Renormalizable Pionless Effective Field Theory at Next-to-Leading Order: The $pd$, $dd$, and $p^3\mathrm{He}$ Case

TL;DR

This paper develops a renormalizable pionless effective field theory including Coulomb interactions at next-to-leading order, providing accurate predictions for scattering observables in charged few-nucleon systems.

Contribution

It introduces a non-perturbative Coulomb treatment in Pionless EFT at NLO and computes scattering parameters for several charged nuclear systems, demonstrating the theory's predictive capability.

Findings

Accurate scattering lengths and effective ranges for $pd$, $dd$, and $p^3$He systems.

Results show mild cutoff dependence and agreement with experimental data.

Validates Pionless EFT as a reliable tool for charged few-nucleon systems.

Abstract

We formulate a renormalizable pionless effective field theory (Pionless EFT) with a non-perturbative treatment of the Coulomb interaction up to next-to-leading order (NLO) for few-nucleon systems. We extract scattering observables for charged clusters by employing two-, three-, and four-body contact interactions and using the stochastic variational method with a Coulomb-corrected harmonic oscillator trap. Our NLO results yield a $pd$ spin-quartet scattering length and effective range of $a_{pd}^{3/2} = 12.76(29)\,\mathrm{fm}$ and $r_{pd}^{3/2} = 1.17(7)\,\mathrm{fm}$; for $dd$ scattering in the spin-quintet channel, we find $a_{dd}^{2} = 6.26(3)\,\mathrm{fm}$ and $r_{dd}^{2} = 1.41(7)\,\mathrm{fm}$; and for $p^3\mathrm{He}$ scattering, the spin-singlet and spin-triplet channels are characterized by $a_{p^3\mathrm{He}}^0 = 11.26(4)\,\mathrm{fm}$, $r_{p^3\mathrm{He}}^0 = 1.65(26)\,\mathrm{fm}$ and $a_{p^3\mathrm{He}}^1 = 9.06(4)\,\mathrm{fm}$, $r_{p^3\mathrm{He}}^1 = 1.36(25)\,\mathrm{fm}$, respectively. Our predictions exhibit mild cutoff dependence and agree well with existing experimental phase shift analyses and potential model calculations. This demonstrates the predictive power of (Pionless EFT) for charged few-nucleon systems.