Perturbative calculations of light nuclei up to N$^3$LO in chiral effective field theory

TL;DR

This paper presents perturbative calculations of ground-state energies for light nuclei up to N$^3$LO in chiral effective field theory, demonstrating the approach's predictive power and consistency with QCD.

Contribution

It introduces a power counting scheme guided by renormalization-group invariance and applies perturbative methods to compute energies of light nuclei up to N$^3$LO.

Findings

Including the $^3$H binding energy improves predictions for $^4$He and $^6$Li.

Perturbative corrections are computed via numerical derivatives of Lanczos diagonalization results.

The approach aligns nuclear structure calculations more closely with quantum chromodynamics.

Abstract

We predict ground-state energies of $^3$H, $^4$He, and $^6$Li in chiral effective field theory up to next-to-next-to-next-to-leading-order (N$^3$LO) using a power counting guided by renormalization-group invariance. Subleading two-nucleon interactions are treated perturbatively, and for $^4$He and $^6$Li, we calculate the perturbative corrections from numerical derivatives of ground-state energies obtained with Lanczos diagonalization. We find that including the $^3$H binding energy in the calibration is essential for robust predictions of $^4$He and $^6$Li. This work demonstrates that the employed power counting can be applied to construct nuclear interactions with predictive power for light nuclei, bringing nuclear structure predictions closer to a foundation in quantum chromodynamics.