https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/s10050-023-01149-7
Regular Article –Theoretical Physics
The importance of few-nucleon forces in chiral effective field theory
1
Department of Physics, Chalmers University of Technology, 412 96, Göteborg, Sweden
2
Nuclear Physics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, 25069, Řež, Czech Republic
3
ELI-NP, “Horia Hulubei” National Institute for Physics and Nuclear Engineering, 30 Reactorului Street, 077125, Bucharest-Magurele, Romania
4
Physics Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 37831, Oak Ridge, TN, USA
5
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Tennessee, 37996, Knoxville, TN, USA
6
Department of Physics & Astronomy and HPC2 Center for Computational Sciences, Mississippi State University, 39762, Mississippi State, MS, USA
7
Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS/IN2P3, IJCLab, 91405, Orsay, France
8
Department of Physics, University of Arizona, 85721, Tucson, AZ, USA
Received:
23
June
2023
Accepted:
2
October
2023
Published online:
18
October
2023
We study the importance of few-nucleon forces in chiral effective field theory for describing many-nucleon systems. A combinatorial argument suggests that three-nucleon forces-which are conventionally regarded as next-to-next-to-leading order-should accompany the two-nucleon force already at leading order (LO) starting with mass number 
10–20. We find that this promotion enables the first realistic description of the 
O ground state based on a renormalization-group-invariant LO interaction. We also performed coupled-cluster calculations of the equation of state for symmetric nuclear matter and our results indicate that LO four-nucleon forces could play a crucial role for describing heavy-mass nuclei. The enhancement mechanism we found is very general and could be important also in other many-body problems.
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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2023. Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
