[Submitted on 27 Sept 2021]
The importance of few-nucleon forces in chiral effective field theory
C.-J. Yang🇸🇪 · A. Ekström🇸🇪 · C. Forssén🇸🇪 · G. Hagen🇺🇸 · G. Rupak🇺🇸 · U. van Kolck🇫🇷
We study the importance of few-nucleon forces in chiral effective field theory for describing many-nucleon systems. A combinatorial argument suggests that three-nucleon forces -- which are conventionally regarded as next-to-next-to-leading order -- should accompany the two-nucleon force already at leading order (LO) starting with mass number . We find that this promotion enables the first realistic description of the O ground state based on a renormalization-group-invariant LO interaction. We also performed coupled-cluster calculations of the equation of state for symmetric nuclear matter and our results indicate that LO four-nucleon forces could play a crucial role for describing heavy-mass nuclei. The enhancement mechanism we found is very general and could be important also in other many-body problems.
- Comments:
- 6 pages, 4 figures
- Subjects:
- Nuclear Theory (nucl-th)
- arXiv:
- 2109.13303 [pdf]