2025/01/16 by B. McClung, Ch. Elster, McClung, B. +3
Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic and Molecular Physics #FOS: Physical sciences #Nuclear Experiment (nucl-ex) #Nuclear Theory (nucl-th) #Nuclear physics research studies #Quantum chaos and dynamical systems
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2501.09231
openalex publication_date 2025/01/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Quantum mechanical invariance principles dictate the most general operator structure that can be present in the nucleon-nucleon (NN) interaction. Five independent operators appear in the on-shell NN amplitude together with five corresponding coefficient functions. The usual choice for these coefficient functions is known as the NN Wolfenstein amplitudes. We analyze the order-by-order convergence of each of the five NN Wolfenstein amplitudes predicted by a semi-local coordinate space potential implementation of chiral effective field theory (χEFT). We do this at laboratory kinetic energies between 25 and 200 MeV for both neutron-proton and proton-proton scattering. Our analysis uses the Gaussian-Process methods developed by the BUQEYE collaboration to describe the contributions of each χEFT order, and so yields truncation uncertainties for each Wolfenstein amplitude that are correlated across scattering angles. We combine information on the size of different orders in the EFT to infer the χEFT breakdown scale for each amplitude, finding, on average, Λb between 750 and 800 MeV. With this choice of Λb, the EFT truncation uncertainties cover both higher-order results and empirical Wolfenstein amplitudes well for all orders other than the leading order.