• DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.132501
• Corpus ID: 24715775

Nuclear Binding Near a Quantum Phase Transition.

@article{Elhatisari2016NuclearBN,
  title={Nuclear Binding Near a Quantum Phase Transition.},
  author={Serdar Elhatisari and Ning Li and Alexander Rokash and Jos{\'e} Manuel Alarc{\'o}n and Dechuan Du and Nico Klein and Bing-Nan Lu and Ulf-G. Mei{\ss}ner and Evgeny Epelbaum and Hermann Krebs and Timo A. L{\"a}hde and Dean Lee and Gautam Rupak},
  journal={Physical review letters},
  year={2016},
  volume={117 13},
  pages={
          132501
        }
}

• Serdar Elhatisari, Ning Li, +10 authors G. Rupak
• Published 14 February 2016
• Physics
• Physical review letters

How do protons and neutrons bind to form nuclei? This is the central question of ab initio nuclear structure theory. While the answer may seem as simple as the fact that nuclear forces are attractive, the full story is more complex and interesting. In this work we present numerical evidence from ab initio lattice simulations showing that nature is near a quantum phase transition, a zero-temperature transition driven by quantum fluctuations. Using lattice effective field theory, we perform Monte Carlo simulations for systems with up to twenty nucleons. For even and equal numbers of protons and neutrons, we discover a first-order transition at zero temperature from a Bose-condensed gas of alpha particles (^{4}He nuclei) to a nuclear liquid. Whether one has an alpha-particle gas or nuclear liquid is determined by the strength of the alpha-alpha interactions, and we show that the alpha-alpha interactions depend on the strength and locality of the nucleon-nucleon interactions. This insight should be useful in improving calculations of nuclear structure and important astrophysical reactions involving alpha capture on nuclei. Our findings also provide a tool to probe the structure of alpha cluster states such as the Hoyle state responsible for the production of carbon in red giant stars and point to a connection between nuclear states and the universal physics of bosons at large scattering length.