Nuclear pairing from chiral pion-nucleon dynamics

Abstract

We use a recently improved version of the chiral nucleon-nucleon potential at next-to-next-to-leading order to calculate the ${}^1{S}_0$ pairing gap in isospin-symmetric nuclear matter. The pairing potential consists of the long-range one- and two-pion exchange terms and two short-distance NN-contact couplings. We find that the inclusion of the two-pion exchange at next-to-next-to-leading order reduces substantially the cut-off dependence of the ${}^1{S}_0$ pairing gap determined by solving a regularised BCS equation. Our results are close to those obtained with the universal low-momentum nucleon-nucleon potential $V_{\mathrm{low}-\mathrm{k}}$ or the phenomenological Gogny D1S force.

Comments: 9 pages, 3 eps figures, submitted to PRC