Chiral symmetry and peripheral neutron-α scattering

2025/02/14 by Yilong Yang, E. Epelbaum, Yang, Yilong +7 · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic and Subatomic Physics Research #FOS: Physical sciences #Nuclear Physics and Applications #Nuclear Theory (nucl-th) #Quantum, superfluid, helium dynamics

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2502.09961

openalex publication_date 2025/02/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

We propose and demonstrate that peripheral neutron-α scattering at low energies can serve as a sensitive and clean probe of the long-range three-nucleon forces. To this aim, we perform \it ab initio quantum Monte Carlo calculations using two- and three-nucleon interactions derived in chiral effective field theory up to third expansion order. We show that the longest-range three-nucleon force stemming from the two-pion exchange plays a crucial role in the proper description of the neutron-α D-wave phase shifts. Our Letter reveals the predictive power of chiral symmetry in the few-body sector and opens a new direction for probing and constraining three-nucleon forces.

Cited by

• Emergence of the halo in ¹¹Li from full nuclear many-body dynamics
• Probing the three-body force in hadronic systems with specific charge parity
• DeepQuark: deep-neural-network approach to multiquark bound states

Related

• Ab initio lattice study of neutron-alpha scattering with chiral forces at N3LO
• Recent advances in chiral EFT based nuclear forces and their applications
• Density-Dependent Neutron-Neutron Interaction from Subleading Chiral Three-Neutron Forces
• Simplification of chiral nuclear forces near the unitarity limit
• Scrutiny of the new class of three-nucleon forces