Medium-Mass Nuclei From Chiral Nucleon-Nucleon Interactions

Abstract

We compute the binding energies, radii, and densities for selected medium-mass nuclei within coupled-cluster theory and employ the "bare" chiral nucleon-nucleon interaction at order N^{3}LO. We find rather well-converged results in model spaces consisting of 15 oscillator shells, and the doubly magic nuclei ^{40}Ca, ^{48}Ca, and the exotic ^{48}Ni are under-bound by about 1 MeV per nucleon within the CCSD approximation. The binding-energy difference between the mirror nuclei ^{48}Ca and ^{48}Ni is close to theoretical mass table evaluations. Our computation of the one-body density matrices and the corresponding natural orbitals and occupation numbers provides a first step to a microscopic foundation of the nuclear shell model.