Effective field theory for lattice nuclei.

Area of Science:

• Nuclear physics
• Quantum chromodynamics
• Computational physics

Background:

• Lattice quantum chromodynamics (LQCD) provides fundamental insights into nuclear forces.
• Simulations often use unphysical pion masses, requiring theoretical bridges to real-world nuclei.
• Nuclear effective field theory (EFT) offers a framework to connect these simulations to nuclear properties.

Purpose of the Study:

• To demonstrate how nuclear EFT and ab initio methods can translate LQCD inputs into nuclear property predictions.
• To establish pionless EFT as the suitable framework for light nuclei in LQCD simulations with unphysical pion masses.
• To predict binding energies for light nuclei based on LQCD data.

Main Methods:

• Utilizing nuclear effective field theory (EFT) combined with ab initio nuclear-structure techniques.
• Employing the effective-interaction hyperspherical harmonics and auxiliary-field diffusion Monte Carlo methods to solve the EFT.
• Fitting the three leading-order EFT parameters to deuteron, dineutron, and triton energies from LQCD simulations at mπ ≈ 800 MeV.

Main Results:

• Successfully reproduced the binding energy of the alpha particle.
• Predicted the binding energies for ground states of mass-5 and mass-6 nuclei.
• Demonstrated the predictive power of combining LQCD data with nuclear EFT.

Conclusions:

• Nuclear EFT provides a robust method to interpret LQCD results for nuclear structure.
• Pionless EFT is effective for describing light nuclei simulated with heavier-than-physical pion masses.
• This approach successfully bridges the gap between fundamental theory and nuclear observations.