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

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.