Energies and radii of light nuclei around unitarity
Sebastian König
Abstract
Abstract Light nuclei fall within a regime of universal physics governed by the fact that the two-nucleon scattering lengths are large compared to the typical nuclear interaction range set by one-pion exchange. This places nuclear physics near the so-called unitarity limit in which the scattering lengths are exactly infinite. Effective field theory provides a powerful theoretical framework to capture this separation of scales in a systematic way. It is shown here that the nuclear force can be constructed as a perturbative expansion around the unitarity limit and that this expansion has good convergence properties for both the binding energies of $$A=3,4$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:mrow><mml:mi>A</mml:mi><mml:mo>=</mml:mo><mml:mn>3</mml:mn><mml:mo>,</mml:mo><mml:mn>4</mml:mn></mml:mrow></mml:math> nuclei as well as for the radii of these states.