Simonis, Johannes (2017)
Ab initio calculations of nuclei using chiral interactions with realistic saturation properties.
Technische Universität Darmstadt
Ph.D. Thesis, Primary publication
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Item Type: | Ph.D. Thesis | ||||
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Type of entry: | Primary publication | ||||
Title: | Ab initio calculations of nuclei using chiral interactions with realistic saturation properties | ||||
Language: | English | ||||
Referees: | Schwenk, Prof. Ph.D Achim ; Hammer, Prof. Dr. Hans-Werner | ||||
Date: | 2017 | ||||
Place of Publication: | Darmstadt | ||||
Date of oral examination: | 19 July 2017 | ||||
Abstract: | Ab initio calculations of nuclei from the valley of stability to the drip lines are a prime challenge in low-energy nuclear theory. The interactions in atomic nuclei, being composed of protons and neutrons, are governed by strong interactions. The fundamental theory of strong interactions is quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Due to the non-perturbative nature of QCD at low energies a direct calculation of nuclear forces from the underlying theory is presently not possible. However, chiral effective field theory (EFT) connects the symmetries of QCD to nuclear forces, enabling a systematic derivation of nuclear interactions, naturally including many-nucleon forces and uncertainty estimates. Chiral EFT interactions are generally softer than phenomenological interactions, but their low- and high-momentum components can still be coupled strongly. Using renormalization group (RG) methods, e.g., the similarity renormalization group, this coupling can be removed by a unitary transformation, resulting in even softer interactions. In addition to advances on nuclear forces and RG methods, several ab initio approaches have been developed in recent years to calculate medium-mass nuclei in a systematically improvable way. We employ some of these advanced many-body approaches in our calculation of nuclei, starting from a set of chiral two- and three-nucleon interactions that, when used in perturbative calculations of symmetric nuclear matter, reproduce empirical saturation properties within theoretical uncertainties. We study ground- and excited-state energies of doubly open-shell nuclei from oxygen to calcium using valence-space interactions derived using many-body perturbation theory. Given the prominent role of the calcium isotopic chain, we perform coupled-cluster calculations to investigate stable and short-lived neutron-rich calcium isotopes. The ab initio calculations reveal that the size of the neutron skin of $^{48}$Ca is much smaller than results from density functional theory. In addition, the very steep increase in charge radii up to $^{52}$Ca measured recently questions the neutron shell closure at $N=32$ and provides an intriguing benchmark for our coupled-cluster calculations. We extend our study to ground states of closed-shell nuclei from $^4$He to $^{78}$Ni using the in-medium similarity renormalization group (IM-SRG). The experimental binding-energy and charge-radius systematics is well described, encouraging the decoupling of valence-space interactions with the IM-SRG to study also open-shell nuclei. The results for ground- and excited-state energies as well as for charge radii of open-shell nuclei achieve a similar level of agreement found in the closed-shell calculations, enabling broad predictions for future experiments up to mass number $\sim80$. |
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URN: | urn:nbn:de:tuda-tuprints-70314 | ||||
Classification DDC: | 500 Science and mathematics > 530 Physics | ||||
Divisions: | 05 Department of Physics > Institute of Nuclear Physics > Theoretische Kernphysik | ||||
Date Deposited: | 15 Dec 2017 13:18 | ||||
Last Modified: | 09 Jul 2020 01:56 | ||||
URI: | https://tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/id/eprint/7031 | ||||
PPN: | 424017393 | ||||
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