Nuclear physics without high-momentum potentials: Constructing the nuclear effective interaction directly from scattering observables

The traditional approach to nuclear physics encodes phase shift information in a nucleon-nucleon (NN) potential, producing a nucleon-level interaction that captures the sub-GeV consequences of QCD. A further reduction to the nuclear scale is needed to produce an effective interaction for soft Hilber...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: K.S. McElvain, W.C. Haxton
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier 2019-10-01
Series:Physics Letters B
Online Access:http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370269319305945
Description
Summary:The traditional approach to nuclear physics encodes phase shift information in a nucleon-nucleon (NN) potential, producing a nucleon-level interaction that captures the sub-GeV consequences of QCD. A further reduction to the nuclear scale is needed to produce an effective interaction for soft Hilbert spaces, such as those employed in the shell model. Here we describe an alternative construction of the effective interaction that is simple and quite precise, proceeding from the QCD scale directly to the nuclear scale. This eliminates the need for constructing and renormalizing the high-momentum NN potential. Instead, continuum phase shifts and mixing angles are used directly at the nuclear scale. The method exploits the analytic continuity in energy of HOBET (Harmonic-Oscillator-Based Effective Theory) to connect bound states to continuum solutions at specific energies. The procedure is systematic, cutoff independent, and convergent, yielding keV accuracy at NNLO or N3LO, depending on the channel. Lepage plots are provided. Keywords: Effective theory, Nucleon-nucleon interaction, Phase shifts
ISSN:0370-2693