2010/03/26 by B. Gebremariam, S. K. Bogner, T. Duguet · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #nucl-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.nuclphysa.2010.12.009
published as Nucl.Phys.A851:17-43,2011 · 28 pages, 12 figures. Mathematica notebook provided with submission.
arxiv created 2010/03/26 · arxiv updated 2015/03/13
The density matrix expansion (DME) of Negele and Vautherin is a convenient tool to map finite-range physics associated with vacuum two- and three-nucleon interactions into the form of a Skyme-like energy density functional (EDF) with density-dependent couplings. In this work, we apply the improved formulation of the DME proposed recently in arXiv:0910.4979 by Gebremariam \it et al. to the non-local Fock energy obtained from chiral effective field theory (EFT) two-nucleon (NN) interactions at next-to-next-to-leading-order (N2LO). The structure of the chiral interactions is such that each coupling in the DME Fock functional can be decomposed into a cutoff-dependent coupling \it constant arising from zero-range contact interactions and a cutoff-independent coupling \it function of the density arising from the universal long-range pion exchanges. This motivates a new microscopically-guided Skyrme phenomenology where the density-dependent couplings associated with the underlying pion-exchange interactions are added to standard empirical Skyrme functionals, and the density-independent Skyrme parameters subsequently refit to data. A Mathematica notebook containing the novel density-dependent couplings is provided.