https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/s10050-020-00098-9
Regular Article – Theoretical Physics
Energies and radii of light nuclei around unitarity
1
Institut für Kernphysik, Technische Universität Darmstadt, 64289, Darmstadt, Germany
2
ExtreMe Matter Institute EMMI, GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung GmbH, 64291, Darmstadt, Germany
3
Department of Physics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, 27695, USA
* e-mail: skoenig@ncsu.edu
Received:
29
October
2019
Accepted:
18
January
2020
Published online:
15
April
2020
Light nuclei fall within a regime of universal physics governed by the fact that the two-nucleon scattering lengths are large compared to the typical nuclear interaction range set by one-pion exchange. This places nuclear physics near the so-called unitarity limit in which the scattering lengths are exactly infinite. Effective field theory provides a powerful theoretical framework to capture this separation of scales in a systematic way. It is shown here that the nuclear force can be constructed as a perturbative expansion around the unitarity limit and that this expansion has good convergence properties for both the binding energies of 
nuclei as well as for the radii of these states.
© The Author(s), 2020
