Reconciling light nuclei and nuclear matter: relativistic calculations
It has been a long-standing challenge to accurately predict the properties of light nuclei and nuclear matter simultaneously in nuclear calculations. In this Letter, we develop the relativistic quantum Monte Carlo methods for the nuclear problem, and calculate the ground-state energies of nuclei using the two-nucleon Bonn force with an unprecedented high accuracy. For nuclei, the present relativistic results significantly outperforms the nonrelativistic results with only two-nucleon forces. Combining the present results for light nuclei and the previous results for nuclear matter with the same Bonn force, a correlation between the properties of light nuclei and the nuclear saturation is revealed, and both systems are well described simultaneously, even without introducing three-nucleon forces. This provides a quantitative understanding of the connection between the light nuclei and nuclear matter saturation properties, which has been an outstanding problem in nuclear calculations for decades.