Quantum Monte Carlo methods for nuclei.
A major goal in nuclear physics is to understand how nuclear binding, structure, and reactions can be described from the underlying interactions between individual nucleons. We want to compute the properties of an A-nucleon system as an A-body problem with free-space nuclear interactions that describe nucleon-nucleon (NN) scattering and the two-nucleon bound-state. Properties of interest for a given nucleus include the ground-state binding energy, excitation spectrum, one- and two-nucleon density and momentum distributions, electromagnetic moments and transitions. They also wish to describe the interactions of nuclei with electrons, neutrinos, pions, nucleons, and other nuclei. Such calculations can provide a standard of comparison to test whether sub-nucleonic effects, such as explicit quark degrees of freedom, must be invoked to explain an observed phenomenon. they can also be used to evaluate nuclear matrix elements needed for some test of the standard model, and to predict reaction rates that are difficult or impossible to measure in the laboratory. For example, all the astrophysical reactions that contribute to the Big Bang or to solar energy production should be amenable to such ab initio calculations. To achieve this goal, they must both determine reasonable Hamiltonians to be used and devise reliable many-body methods to evaluate them. Significant progress has been made in the past decade on both fronts, with the development of a number of potential models that accurately reproduce NN elastic scattering data, and a variety of advanced many-body methods. In practice, to reproduce experimental energies and transitions, it appears necessary to add many-nucleon forces to the Hamiltonian and electroweak charge and current operators beyond the basic single-nucleon terms. While testing their interactions and currents against experiment, it is also important to test the many-body methods against each other to ensure that any approximations made are not biasing the results.
- Research Organization:
- Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC)
- DOE Contract Number:
- DE-AC02-06CH11357
- OSTI ID:
- 969912
- Report Number(s):
- ANL/PHY/JA-60696; TRN: US201002%%881
- Journal Information:
- Phys. in Canada, Vol. 64, Issue 2 ; 2008
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- ENGLISH
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