Hermann Krebs

Ab initio calculation of the Hoyle state

The Hoyle state plays a crucial role in the helium burning of stars heavier than our Sun and in the production of carbon and other elements necessary for life. This excited state of the carbon-12 nucleus was postulated by Hoyle as a necessary ingredient for the fusion of three alpha particles to produce carbon at stellar temperatures. Although the Hoyle state was seen experimentally more than a half century ago nuclear theorists have not yet uncovered the nature of this state from first principles. In this Letter we report the first ab initio calculation of the low-lying states of carbon-12 using supercomputer lattice simulations and a theoretical framework known as effective field theory. In addition to the ground state and excited spin-2 state, we find a resonance at -85(3)  MeV with all of the properties of the Hoyle state and in agreement with the experimentally observed energy.

Improved chiral nucleon-nucleon potential up to next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order

Abstract.We present improved nucleon-nucleon potentials derived in chiral effective field theory up to next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order. We argue that the nonlocal momentum-space regulator employed in the two-nucleon potentials of previous works (Nucl. Phys. A 747, 362 (2005) and Phys. Rev. C 68, 041001 (2003)) is not the most efficient choice, in particular since it affects the long-range part of the interaction. We are able to significantly reduce finite-cutoff artefacts by using an appropriate regularization in coordinate space which maintains the analytic structure of the amplitude. The new potentials do not require the additional spectral function regularization employed in (Nucl. Phys. A 747, 362 (2005)) to cut off the short-range components of the two-pion exchange and make use of the low-energy constants ci and di determined from pion-nucleon scattering without any fine tuning. We discuss in detail the construction of the new potentials and convergence of the chiral expansion for two-nucleon observables. We also employ a simple approach for estimating the theoretical uncertainty in few-nucleon calculations from the truncation of the chiral expansion that replaces previous reliance on cutoff variation.

Precision nucleon-nucleon potential at fifth order in the chiral expansion

We present a nucleon-nucleon potential at fifth order in chiral effective field theory. We find a substantial improvement in the description of nucleon-nucleon phase shifts as compared to the fourth-order results utilizing a coordinate-space regularization. This provides clear evidence of the corresponding two-pion exchange contributions with all low-energy constants being determined from pion-nucleon scattering. The fifth-order corrections to nucleon-nucleon observables appear to be of a natural size, which confirms the good convergence of the chiral expansion for nuclear forces. Furthermore, the obtained results provide strong support for the novel way of quantifying the theoretical uncertainty due to the truncation of the chiral expansion proposed by the authors. Our work opens up new perspectives for precision ab initio calculations in few- and many-nucleon systems and is especially relevant for ongoing efforts towards a quantitative understanding of the structure of the three-nucleon force in the framework of chiral effective field theory.

Nuclear forces with Δ excitations up to next-to-next-to-leading order, part I: Peripheral nucleon-nucleon waves

Abstract.We study the two-nucleon force at next-to-next-to-leading order in a chiral effective field theory with explicit Δ degrees of freedom. Fixing the appearing low-energy constants from a next-to-leading-order calculation of pion-nucleon threshold parameters, we find an improved convergence of most peripheral nucleon-nucleon phases compared to the theory with pions and nucleons only. In the delta-full theory, the next-to-leading-order corrections are dominant in most partial waves considered.

Ab Initio Calculation of the Spectrum and Structure of

We present ab initio lattice calculations of the low-energy even-parity states of 16O using chiral nuclear effective field theory. We find good agreement with the empirical energy spectrum, and with the electromagnetic properties and transition rates. For the ground state, we find that the nucleons are arranged in a tetrahedral configuration of alpha clusters. For the first excited spin-0 state, we find that the predominant structure is a square configuration of alpha clusters, with rotational excitations that include the first spin-2 state.

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The Hoyle state plays a crucial role in the helium burning of stars that have reached the red giant stage. The close proximity of this state to the triple-alpha threshold is needed for the production of carbon, oxygen, and other elements necessary for life. We investigate whether this life-essential condition is robust or delicately fine-tuned by measuring its dependence on the fundamental constants of nature, specifically the light quark mass and the strength of the electromagnetic interaction. We show that there exist strong correlations between the alpha-particle binding energy and the various energies relevant to the triple-alpha process. We derive limits on the variation of these fundamental parameters from the requirement that sufficient amounts of carbon and oxygen be generated in stars. We also discuss the implications of our results for an anthropic view of the Universe.

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Processes such as the scattering of alpha particles (4He), the triple-alpha reaction, and alpha capture play a major role in stellar nucleosynthesis. In particular, alpha capture on carbon determines the ratio of carbon to oxygen during helium burning, and affects subsequent carbon, neon, oxygen, and silicon burning stages. It also substantially affects models of thermonuclear type Ia supernovae, owing to carbon detonation in accreting carbon–oxygen white-dwarf stars. In these reactions, the accurate calculation of the elastic scattering of alpha particles and alpha-like nuclei—nuclei with even and equal numbers of protons and neutrons—is important for understanding background and resonant scattering contributions. First-principles calculations of processes involving alpha particles and alpha-like nuclei have so far been impractical, owing to the exponential growth of the number of computational operations with the number of particles. Here we describe an ab initio calculation of alpha–alpha scattering that uses lattice Monte Carlo simulations. We use lattice effective field theory to describe the low-energy interactions of protons and neutrons, and apply a technique called the ‘adiabatic projection method’ to reduce the eight-body system to a two-cluster system. We take advantage of the computational efficiency and the more favourable scaling with system size of auxiliary-field Monte Carlo simulations to compute an ab initio effective Hamiltonian for the two clusters. We find promising agreement between lattice results and experimental phase shifts for s-wave and d-wave scattering. The approximately quadratic scaling of computational operations with particle number suggests that it should be possible to compute alpha scattering and capture on carbon and oxygen in the near future. The methods described here can be applied to ultracold atomic few-body systems as well as to hadronic systems using lattice quantum chromodynamics to describe the interactions of quarks and gluons.

Viability of Carbon-Based Life as a Function of the Light Quark Mass

Abstract.We present lattice calculations for the ground-state energies of tritium, helium-3, helium-4, lithium-6, and carbon-12 nuclei. Our results were previously summarized in a letter publication. This paper provides full details of the calculations. We include isospin-breaking, Coulomb effects, and interactions up to next-to-next-to-leading order in chiral effective field theory.

Ab initio alpha–alpha scattering

We derive the sub-subleading two-pion exchange contributions to the three-nucleon force which appear at next-to-next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order in chiral effective field theory. In order to determine the low-energy constants, a complete analysis of pion-nucleon scattering at the subleading-loop order in the heavy-baryon expansion is carried out utilizing the power counting scheme employed in the derivation of the nuclear forces. We discuss the convergence of the chiral expansion for this particular three-nucleon force topology and give the values of the low-energy constants which provide the most realistic description of the three-nucleon force when the chiral expansion is truncated at next-to-next-to-leading order.

Lattice calculations for A = 3 , 4, 6, 12 nuclei using chiral effective field theory

Abstract We extend Nuclear Lattice Effective Field Theory (NLEFT) to medium-mass nuclei, and present results for the ground states of alpha nuclei from 4 He to 28 Si, calculated up to next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in the EFT expansion. This computational advance is made possible by extrapolations of lattice data using multiple initial and final states. For our soft two-nucleon interaction, we find that the overall contribution from multi-nucleon forces must change sign from attractive to repulsive with increasing nucleon number. This effect is not produced by three-nucleon forces at NNLO, but it can be approximated by an effective four-nucleon interaction. We discuss the convergence of the EFT expansion and the broad significance of our findings for future ab initio calculations.