New Skyrme parametrizations to describe finite nuclei and neutron star matter with realistic effective masses

Abstract

The phenomenological Skyrme energy density functional theory is one of the most popular theories for dealing with finite nuclei and infinite nuclear matter, including neutron star matter. However, the density dependence of the effective masses of common Skyrme parametrizations is completely different from the one found in microscopic calculations. This can have drastic consequences. For instance, in a recent study we reported that in many Skyrme functionals, the neutron Fermi velocity exceeds the speed of light at densities that exist in neutron-star cores. To solve this problem, we try to construct new Skyrme parametrizations by including constraints from microscopic calculations of the effective mass in addition to binding energies and charge radii of finite nuclei and different microscopic equations of state of pure neutron matter. We give the parameters of the new Skyrme forces and show that our new effective interactions can successfully describe properties of finite nuclei and nuclear matter (including pure neutron matter, symmetric nuclear matter, and neutron star matter).

Comments: 21 pages (including 12 figures, 8 tables, and appendix). v2: major changes; v3: equations (A2) and (A5) corrected and minor other changes