A consistent description of the relativistic effects and three-body interactions in atomic nuclei

Abstract

A microscopic relativistic Hamiltonian containing consistent relativistic and 3N potentials is, for the first time, constructed based on the leading-order covariant pionless effective field theory, and this Hamiltonian is solved by developing a new accurate relativistic ab initio method with a novel symmetry-based artificial neural network for A≤4 nuclei. It is found that the relativistic effects overcome the energy collapse problem for 3H and 4He without promoting a repulsive three-nucleon interaction to leading order as in nonrelativistic calculations. To exactly reproduce the experimental ground-state energies, a three-nucleon interaction is needed and its interplay with the relativistic effects plays a crucial role. The presented results open the new avenue for a unified and consistent study on relativistic effects and many-body interactions in atomic nuclei, and would also help to achieve more accurate ab initio calculations for nuclei.

Keywords

• Variational Monte Carlo
• Artificial neural-network
• Pionless effective field theory
• Relativistic effects
• Three-body force