Speaker
Kenneth McElvain
(UC Berkeley)
Description
The calculation of nuclear matrix elements (dark matter & neutrinos) and other observables rely on the construction of a nuclear effective interaction, usually in a harmonic oscillator basis. The standard strategy for constructing the interaction is to first fit a potential formed by the product of a large number of pairs of coefficients and symmetry allowed operators to scattering observables (phase shifts and mixing angles). A momentum cutoff is then applied, commonly followed by a unitary transform to decouple high and low momentum states and finished by integrating out high quanta states. These steps introduce errors, break translation invariance and induce 3+ body forces, which are often untracked.
We demonstrate an alternative wherein we directly construct the effective interaction in a small harmonic oscillator basis by fitting to scattering observables at a range of continuum energies. The result is validated by computation of bound state energies and comparison of wave functions to the projection of numerical results.
Author
Kenneth McElvain
(UC Berkeley)
Co-author
Wick Haxton
(University of California, Berkeley)
