Decoupling of spurious deeply bound states with the similarity renormalization group
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Wendt, K. A.↗
Engineering topics
Furnstahl, R J
Publications and source records attributed to Furnstahl, R J.
Improved nuclear matter calculations from chiral low-momentum interactions
We present nuclear matter calculations based on low-momentum interactions derived from chiral effective field theory potentials. The current calculations use an improved treatment of the three-nucleon force (3NF) contribution that includes a corrected combinatorial factor beyond Hartree-Fock that was omitted in previous nuclear matter calculations. We find realistic saturation properties using parameters fit only to few-body data, but with larger uncertainty estimates from cutoff dependence and the 3NF parametrization than in previous calculations.
73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
Evolving nuclear many-body forces with the similarity renormalization group
In recent years, the Similarity Renormalization Group has provided a powerful and versatile means to soften interactions for ab initio nuclear calculations. The substantial contribution of both induced and initial three-body forces to the nuclear interaction has required the consistent evolution of free-space Hamiltonians in the three-particle space. We present the most recent progress on this work, extending the calculational capability to the p-shell nuclei and showing that the hierarchy of induced many-body forces is consistent with previous estimates. Calculations over a range of the flow parameter for {sup 6}Li, including fully evolved NN + 3N interactions, show moderate contributions due to induced four-body forces and display the same improved convergence properties as in lighter nuclei. A systematic analysis provides further evidence that the hierarchy of many-body forces is preserved.
73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
Testing the density matrix expansion against ab initio calculations of trapped neutron drops
Microscopic input to a universal nuclear energy density functional can be provided through the density matrix expansion (DME), which has recently been revived and improved. Several DME implementation strategies are tested for neutron drop systems in harmonic traps by comparing to Hartree-Fock (HF) and ab initio no-core full configuration (NCFC) calculations with a model interaction (Minnesota potential). The new DME with exact treatment of Hartree contributions is found to best reproduce HF results and supplementing the functional with fit Skyrme-like contact terms shows systematic improvement toward the full NCFC results.
73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
Operator evolution via the similarity renormalization group: The deuteron
Similarity renormalization group (SRG) flow equations can be used to unitarily soften nuclear Hamiltonians by decoupling high-energy intermediate-state contributions to low-energy observables while maintaining the natural hierarchy of many-body forces. Analogous flow equations can be used to consistently evolve operators so that observables are unchanged if no approximations are made. The question in practice is whether the advantages of a softer Hamiltonian and less-correlated wave functions might be offset by complications in approximating and applying other operators. Here we examine the properties of SRG-evolved operators, focusing in this article on applications to the deuteron but leading toward methods for few-body systems. We find the advantageous features generally carry over to other operators with additional simplifications in some cases from factorization of the unitary transformation operator.
71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
Microscopically based energy density functionals for nuclei using the density matrix expansion: Implementation and pre-optimization
In a recent series of articles, Gebremariam, Bogner, and Duguet derived a microscopically based nuclear energy density functional by applying the density matrix expansion (DME) to the Hartree-Fock energy obtained from chiral effective field theory two- and three-nucleon interactions. Owing to the structure of the chiral interactions, each coupling in the DME functional is given as the sum of a coupling constant arising from zero-range contact interactions and a coupling function of the density arising from the finite-range pion exchanges. Because the contact contributions have essentially the same structure as those entering empirical Skyrme functionals, a microscopically guided Skyrme phenomenology has been suggested in which the contact terms in the DME functional are released for optimization to finite-density observables to capture short-range correlation energy contributions from beyond Hartree-Fock. The present article is the first attempt to assess the ability of the newly suggested DME functional, which has a much richer set of density dependencies than traditional Skyrme functionals, to generate sensible and stable results for nuclear applications. The results of the first proof-of-principle calculations are given, and numerous practical issues related to the implementation of the new functional in existing Skyrme codes are discussed. Using a restricted singular value decomposition optimization procedure, it is found that the new DME functional gives numerically stable results and exhibits a small but systematic reduction of our test {chi}{sup 2} function compared to standard Skyrme functionals, thus justifying its suitability for future global optimizations and large-scale calculations.
73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗