Auxiliary field diffusion Monte Carlo calculation of nuclei with A < or = 40 with tensor interactions

Ab initio calculation of the Hoyle state

The Hoyle state plays a crucial role in the helium burning of stars heavier than our Sun and in the production of carbon and other elements necessary for life. This excited state of the carbon-12 nucleus was postulated by Hoyle as a necessary ingredient for the fusion of three alpha particles to produce carbon at stellar temperatures. Although the Hoyle state was seen experimentally more than a half century ago nuclear theorists have not yet uncovered the nature of this state from first principles. In this Letter we report the first ab initio calculation of the low-lying states of carbon-12 using supercomputer lattice simulations and a theoretical framework known as effective field theory. In addition to the ground state and excited spin-2 state, we find a resonance at -85(3)  MeV with all of the properties of the Hoyle state and in agreement with the experimentally observed energy.

Lattice effective field theory calculations for A = 3, 4, 6, 12 nuclei

We present lattice results for the ground state energies of tritium, helium-3, helium-4, lithium-6, and carbon-12 nuclei. Our analysis includes isospin breaking, Coulomb effects, and interactions up to next-to-next-to-leading order in chiral effective field theory.

Equation of state of superfluid neutron matter and the calculation of the 1S0 pairing gap

We present a quantum Monte Carlo study of the zero-temperature equation of state of neutron matter and the computation of the 1S0 pairing gap in the low-density regime with rho < 0.04 fm(-3). The system is described by a nonrelativistic nuclear Hamiltonian including both two- and three-nucleon interactions of the Argonne and Urbana type. This model interaction provides very accurate results in the calculation of the binding energy of light nuclei. A suppression of the gap with respect to the pure BCS theory is found, but sensibly weaker than in other works that attempt to include polarization effects in an approximate way.

Medium-mass nuclei from chiral nucleon-nucleon interactions

We compute the binding energies, radii, and densities for selected medium-mass nuclei within coupled-cluster theory and employ a bare chiral nucleon-nucleon interaction at next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order. We find rather well-converged results in model spaces consisting of 15 oscillator shells, and the doubly magic nuclei 40Ca, 48Ca, and the exotic 48Ni are underbound by about 1 MeV per nucleon within the coupled-cluster singles-doubles approximation. The binding-energy difference between the mirror nuclei 48Ca and 48Ni is close to theoretical mass table evaluations. Our computation of the one-body density matrices and the corresponding natural orbitals and occupation numbers provides a first step to a microscopic foundation of the nuclear shell model.