Local chiral potentials with <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:mi mathvariant="normal">Δ</mml:mi></mml:math>-intermediate states and the structure of light nuclei

Abstract

We present fully local versions of the minimally nonlocal nucleon-nucleon potentials constructed in a previous paper [Piarulli et al., Phys. Rev. C 91, 024003 (2015)], and use them in hypersperical harmonics and quantum Monte Carlo calculations of ground and excited states of $^{3}\mathrm{H}$, $^{3}\mathrm{He}$, $^{4}\mathrm{He}$, $^{6}\mathrm{He}$, and $^{6}\mathrm{Li}$ nuclei. The long-range part of these local potentials includes one- and two-pion exchange contributions without and with $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}$ isobars in the intermediate states up to order ${Q}^{3}$ ($Q$ denotes generically the low momentum scale) in the chiral expansion, while the short-range part consists of contact interactions up to order ${Q}^{4}$. The low-energy constants multiplying these contact interactions are fitted to the 2013 Granada database in two different ranges of laboratory energies, either 0--125 MeV or 0--200 MeV, and to the deuteron binding energy and $nn$ singlet scattering length. Fits to these data are performed for three models characterized by long- and short-range cutoffs, ${R}_{\mathrm{L}}$ and ${R}_{\mathrm{S}}$, respectively, ranging from $({R}_{\mathrm{L}},{R}_{\mathrm{S}})=(1.2,0.8)$ fm down to $(0.8,0.6)$ fm. The long-range (short-range) cutoff regularizes the one- and two-pion exchange (contact) part of the potential.