Speaker
Description
We present lattice QCD calculations of the masses of light nuclei, including the deuteron, dineutron, $^3$He, and $^4$He, using physical sea quarks and valence quark masses corresponding to pion masses in the range 140$-$700 MeV. At the physical point, the lowest finite-volume two-nucleon energy levels exhibit a bound deuteron and an unbound dineutron within uncertainties, while at heavier quark masses they indicate the presence of deeply bound states. The observed quark-mass dependence of binding energies provides first-principles constraints on two- and three-nucleon interactions, complementing expectations from low-energy effective field theories. From this dependence, we extract nuclear sigma terms and quantify the sensitivity of nuclear masses to variations in the light-quark masses. Using the QCD trace anomaly relation, we further outline the decomposition of nuclear binding energies into quark-mass and gluonic contributions at a scale of $\mu = 2$ GeV. Finally, we will discuss how these methodologies provide new insight into the QCD origin of nuclear binding.