Three-nucleon forces: implementation and applications to atomic nuclei and dense matter

DOI10.1016/J.PHYSREP.2020.08.009MaRDI QIDQ822924zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Publication date 24 September 2021

Published in Physics Reports (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.09548

effective field theory three-body problem

History of mathematics in the 21st century (01A61) History of quantum theory (81-03) Effective quantum field theories (81T12) Nuclear physics (81V35)

Abstract: Recent advances in nuclear structure theory have significantly enlarged the accessible part of the nuclear landscape via ab initio many-body calculations. These developments open new ways for microscopic studies of light, medium-mass and heavy nuclei as well as nuclear matter and represent an important step toward a systematic and comprehensive understanding of atomic nuclei across the nuclear chart. While remarkable agreement has been found between different many-body methods for a given nuclear Hamiltonian, the comparison with experiment and the understanding of theoretical uncertainties are still important open questions. The observed discrepancies to experiment indicate deficiencies in presently used nuclear interactions and operators. Chiral effective field theory (EFT) allows to systematically derive contributions to nucleon-nucleon (NN), three-nucleon (3N) and higher-body interactions including estimates of theoretical uncertainties. While the treatment of NN interactions in many-body calculations is well established, the calculation of 3N interactions and their incorporation in ab initio frameworks is still a frontier. This work reviews in detail recent and current developments on the derivation and implementation of improved 3N interactions and provides a comprehensive introduction to fundamental methods for their practical calculation and representation. We further give an overview of novel and established methods that facilitate the inclusion and treatment of 3N interactions in ab initio nuclear structure frameworks and present a selection of the latest calculations of atomic nuclei as well as nuclear matter based on state-of-the-art nuclear NN and 3N interactions derived within chiral EFT. Finally, we discuss ongoing efforts, open questions and future directions.

Review text

This paper is a review of ab initio many-body calculations in relation to chiral effective field theory (EFT) for application in microscopical studies of atomic nuclei over a wide range of masses. This technique allows the systematical derivation of nucleon-nucleon (NN), three-nucleon (3N) and higher-body interaction. The report is foccussed on the implementation of 3N interactions in such a framework. After an introductory segment an entire section is dedicated to nuclear interactions and the chiral effective field theory with particular emphasize on 3N interactions. The next section is dealing with the representation of these interactions : momentum basis representation, partial-wave decomposition, introduction of spin- and isospin dependent interactions, decomposition and antisymmetrization, regularization and transformation of the interaction's matrix elements to harmonic oscillator basis. Section 4 concerns the actual incorporation of 3N interactions in the many-body framework with the keypoints of partial-wave series convergence and the normal oredering in nuclear matter and finite nuclei. In last section before concluding the review contains the most relevant applications of this technique : properties of nuclear matter in astrophysical context, ground-state, charge radii, spectra and electromagnetic response of finite nuclei, as well decay and complex scattering processes. Mathematical techniques employed in the theoretical framework are briefly presented at the end of the review and contain the conventions used in the evaluation of matrix elements of operators like the NN interaction or the three-body cyclic permutation, partial-wave decomposition and ordering of local 3N interactions. This paper is intended to a rather narrow range of readers, especially specialist in nuclear many-body physics, the exposition being centred more on numerical results and their graphical representation.

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