Ab initio study of neutron drops with chiral Hamiltonians

Abstract

We report ab initio calculations for neutron drops in a 10 MeV external harmonic-oscillator trap using chiral nucleon–nucleon plus three-nucleon interactions. We present total binding energies, internal energies, radii and odd–even energy differences for neutron numbers N=2–18 using the no-core shell model with and without importance truncation. Furthermore, we present total binding energies for N=8,16,20,28,40,50 obtained in a coupled-cluster approach. Comparisons with quantum Monte Carlo results, where available, using Argonne v8′ with three-nucleon interactions reveal important dependences on the chosen Hamiltonian. Keywords: Neutron drop, Ab initio, Chiral Hamiltonian, No-core shell model, Importance truncation, Coupled cluster