Local Two- and Three-Nucleon Interactions Within Chiral Effective Field Theory

Abstract

In the past decade, chiral effective field theory has been the standard tool to systematically derive nuclear interactions. The most commonly used interactions from chiral effective field theory, derived up to fourth order in the expansion, have been shown to describe many nuclear systems with great success. These interactions are nonlocal meaning that they cannot be written only in terms of the relative separation of nucleons. Hence, these interactions are not applicable to certain many-body methods that require local interactions as input, such as quantum Monte Carlo methods. In this chapter, the authors will provide a pedagogical introduction to local two- and three-nucleon interactions derived within chiral effective field theory.