Neutron Drip Line in Calcium Isotopes from a Chiral Interaction
Journal article, 2026
Interactions derived from effective field theories of quantum chromodynamics have thus far failed to bind calcium nuclei beyond neutron number N=40, while nuclear density functionals typically place the neutron drip line near ^70Ca, at N=50. We present the chiral interaction N^3LO_Texas, a combination of two- and three-nucleon potentials at fourth and third chiral order, respectively, with low-energy constants optimized using emulator-accelerated fits to few- and many-body data. This interaction accurately reproduces binding energies and charge radii of key nuclei with mass number A=3 to 208, important excited states, and nuclear matter near saturation. Using ab initio methods, coupled cluster and valence-space in-medium similarity renormalization group, we find that the calcium two-neutron drip line extends to ^71Ca.
Author
B. S. Hu
Peking University
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Texas A&M University
Andreas Ekström
Chalmers, Physics, Subatomic, High Energy and Plasma Physics
Christian Forssén
Chalmers, Physics, Subatomic, High Energy and Plasma Physics
G. Hagen
University of Tennessee
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Weiguang Jiang
Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
T. Miyagi
University of Tsukuba
T. Papenbrock
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
University of Tennessee
Physical Review Letters
0031-9007 (ISSN) 1079-7114 (eISSN)
Vol. 137 14 142502Subject Categories (SSIF 2025)
Subatomic Physics
DOI
10.1103/pz1t-q6v1