Incorporating Brueckner-Hartree-Fock correlations in energy density functionals
Recently, a microscopically motivated nuclear energy density functional was derived by applying the density-matrix expansion to the Hartree-Fock (HF) energy obtained from long-range chiral effective-field theory two- and three-nucleon interactions. However, the HF approach cannot account for all many-body correlations. One class of correlations is included by Brueckner-Hartree-Fock (BHF) theory, which gives an improved definition of the one-body HF potential by replacing the interaction by a reaction matrix G. In this paper, we find that the difference between the G matrix and the similarity renormalization group evolved nucleon-nucleon potential V SRG can be well accounted for by a truncated series of contact terms. This is consistent with renormalization-group decoupling generating a series of counterterms as short-distance physics is integrated out. Here, the coefficients C n of the power series expansion Σ C n q n for the counterterms are examined for two potentials at different renormalization-group resolutions and at a range of densities. The success of this expansion for G–V SRG means we can apply the density-matrix expansion at the HF level with low-momentum interactions and density-dependent zero-range interactions to model BHF correlations.