Global Sensitivity Analysis of Bulk Properties of an Atomic Nucleus
Journal article, 2019

We perform a global sensitivity analysis of the binding energy and the charge radius of the nucleus O-16 to identify the most influential low-energy constants in the next-to-next-to-leading order chiral Hamiltonian with two- and three-nucleon forces. For this purpose, we develop a subspace-projected coupled-cluster method using eigenvector continuation [Frame D. et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 032501 (2018)]. With this method, we compute the binding energy and charge radius of O-16 at more than 10(6) different values of the 16 low-energy constants in one hour on a standard laptop computer. For relatively small subspace projections, the root-mean-square error is about 1% compared to full-space coupled-cluster results. We find that 58(1)% of the variance in energy can be apportioned to a single contact term in the S-3(1) wave, whereas the radius depends sensitively on several low-energy constants and their higher-order correlations. The results identify the most important parameters for describing nuclear saturation and help prioritize efforts for uncertainty reduction of theoretical predictions. The achieved acceleration opens up an array of computational statistics analyses of the underlying description of the strong nuclear interaction in nuclei across the Segre chart.

Author

Andreas Ekström

Chalmers, Physics, Subatomic and Plasma Physics

Gaute Hagen

University of Tennessee

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Physical Review Letters

0031-9007 (ISSN) 1079-7114 (eISSN)

Vol. 123 25 252501

Subject Categories

Subatomic Physics

Other Physics Topics

Theoretical Chemistry

DOI

10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.252501

PubMed

31922790

More information

Latest update

11/13/2020