Double-folding potentials from chiral effective field theory

Abstract

The determination of nucleus–nucleus potentials is important not only to describe the properties of the colliding system, but also to extract nuclear-structure information and for modelling nuclear reactions for astrophysics. We present the first determination of double-folding potentials based on chiral effective field theory at leading, next-to-leading, and next-to-next-to-leading order. To this end, we construct new soft local chiral effective field theory interactions. We benchmark this approach in the 16O–16O system, and present results for cross sections computed for elastic scattering up to 700 MeV in energy, as well as for the astrophysical S-factor of the fusion reaction.