The long and winding road from chiral effective Lagrangians to nuclear structure

Abstract

I review the chiral dynamics of nuclear physics. In the first part, I discuss the new developments in the construction of the forces between two, three and four nucleons which have been partly carried out to fifth order in the chiral expansion. It is also shown that based on these forces in conjunction with the estimation of the corresponding theoretical uncertainties, the need for threenucleon forces in few nucleon systems can be unambiguously established. I also introduce the lattice formulation of these forces, which allow for truly ab initio calculations of nuclear structure and reactions. I present some pertinent results of the nuclear lattice approach. Finally, I discuss how few-nucleon systems and nuclei can be used to explore symmetries and physics within and beyond the standard model.

Neutrinoless double- β decay in effective field theory: The light-Majorana neutrino-exchange mechanism

“…. While phenomenologically successful [43], the Weinberg power counting is not fully consistent. Inconsistencies appear in some channels, such as the 1 S 0 channel, where the cutoff dependence of the solution of the Lippman-Schwinger equation cannot be absorbed by the counterterms that appear at lowest order [41,42].…”

Strangeness and Δ resonance in compact stars with relativistic-mean-field models

“…Meanwhile, it is worth mentioning that the covariant density functional PKDD adopted here is phenomenological, where the nucleon-meson coupling constants are fixed according to the masses of spherical nuclei, the incompressibility, saturation density, and symmetry energy of nuclear matter [70]. In light of the recent developments of microscopic many-body calculations in describing finite nuclei and nuclear matter starting from realistic nucleonnucleon interactions [82][83][84][85][86][87][88], a more refined adjustment of parameters incorporating those results are necessary. A possible way to reach this in RMF model is to intro-duce density-dependent coupling constants derived from self-energies of Dirac-Brueckner calculations of nuclear matter [57,89], which are found decreasing with density and can be reproduced with Eqs.…”

Lattice QCD and neutrino-nucleus scattering

“…Even in nuclear spectroscopy, three-body potentials improve the agreement with observed nuclear levels [18][19][20]. Often these calculations use phenomenological potentials, but effective field theory (EFT) offers a direct connection to QCD [21][22][23][24]. Chiral EFTs are, however, limited to a kinematic range where the momenta are small relative to the chiral symmetry breaking scale Λ χ ∼ 700 MeV.…”