| Irfu-10-42
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| Microscopically-constrained Fock energy density functionals from chiral effective field theory. I. Two-nucleon interactions. |
| B. Gebremariam, S. K. Bogner, T. Duguet |
| 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 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 (N^2LO). The structure of the chiral interactions is such that each coupling in the DME Fock functional can be decomposed into a cutoff-dependent coupling constant arising from zero-range contact interactions and a cutoff-independent coupling 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 link to a Mathematica notebook containing the novel density-dependent couplings and the corresponding ingredients for the single-particle fields is provided. |
