Physics Letters B 772 (2017) 839–848
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Physics Letters B
www.elsevier.com/locate/physletb
Ground-state properties of
4
He and
16
O extrapolated from lattice QCD
with pionless EFT
L. Contessi
a,b
, A. Lovato
c
, F. Pederiva
a,b,∗
, A. Roggero
d
, J. Kirscher
e
, U. van Kolck
f,g
a
Physics Department, University of Trento, Via Sommarive 14, I-38123 Trento, Italy
b
INFN-TIFPA Trento Institute of Fundamental Physics and Applications, Via Sommarive, 14, 38123 Povo TN, Italy
c
Physics Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL 60439, USA
d
Institute for Nuclear Theory, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA
e
Department of Physics, The City College of New York, New York, NY 10031, USA
f
Institut de Physique Nucléaire, CNRS/IN2P3, Univ. Paris-Sud, Université Paris-Saclay, F-91406 Orsay, France
g
Department of Physics, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
Article history:
Received
25 January 2017
Received
in revised form 8 May 2017
Accepted
24 July 2017
Available
online 26 July 2017
Editor:
W. Haxton
We extend the prediction range of Pionless Effective Field Theory with an analysis of the ground state of
16
O in leading order. To renormalize the theory, we use as input both experimental data and lattice QCD
predictions of nuclear observables, which probe the sensitivity of nuclei to increased quark masses. The
nuclear many-body Schrödinger equation is solved with the Auxiliary Field Diffusion Monte Carlo method.
For the first time in a nuclear quantum Monte Carlo calculation, a linear optimization procedure, which
allows us to devise an accurate trial wave function with a large number of variational parameters, is
adopted. The method yields a binding energy of
4
He which is in good agreement with experiment at
physical pion mass and with lattice calculations at larger pion masses. At leading order we do not find
any evidence of a
16
O state which is stable against breakup into four
4
He, although higher-order terms
could bind
16
O.
© 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by SCOAP
3
.
1. Introduction
Establishing a clear path leading from the fundamental theory
of strong interactions, namely Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD),
to nuclear observables, such as nuclear masses and electroweak
transitions, is one of the main goals of modern nuclear theory. At
present, the most reliable numerical technique to perform QCD
calculations is Lattice QCD (LQCD). It combines recent advances
in high-performance computing, innovative algorithms, and con-
ceptual
breakthroughs in nuclear theory to produce predictions of
nucleon–nucleon scattering, and the binding energies and mag-
netic
moments of light nuclei. However, there are technical prob-
lems,
which have so far limited the applicability of LQCD to A ≤4
baryon
systems and to artificially large quark masses. Then, LQCD
calculations require significantly smaller computational resources
to yield meaningful signal-to-noise ratios. In this paper, we con-
sider
as examples LQCD data sets comprised of binding ener-
*
Corresponding author.
E-mail
address: francesco.pederiva@unitn.it (F. Pederiva).
gies obtained at pion masses of m
π
805 MeV [1] and m
π
510 MeV [2].
The
link between QCD and the entire nuclear landscape is
a Hamiltonian whose systematic derivation was developed in
the framework of effective field theory (EFT) in the last two
decades [3–5]. This is achieved by exploiting a separation between
“hard” (M) and “soft” (Q ) momentum scales. The active degrees of
freedom at soft scales are hadrons whose interactions are consis-
tent
with QCD. Effective potentials and currents are derived from
the most general Lagrangian constrained by the QCD symmetries,
and employed with standard few- and many-body techniques to
make predictions for nuclear observables in a systematic expan-
sion
in Q /M. The interaction strengths carry information about
the details of the QCD dynamics, and can be obtained by matching
observables calculated in EFT and LQCD.
The
aim of this work is the first extension of this program to
the realm of medium-heavy nuclei. By using Pionless EFT (EFT(
/
π ))
coupled to the Auxiliary Field Diffusion Monte Carlo (AFDMC)
method [6] we analyze the connection between the ground state
of
16
O and its nucleon constituents. Beside physical data, the con-
sideration
of higher quark-mass input allows us to investigate the
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2017.07.048
0370-2693/
© 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by
SCOAP
3
.