Nuclear lattice simulations with chiral effective field theory

Abstract

We study nuclear and neutron matter by combining chiral effective field theory with nonperturbative lattice methods. In our approach, nucleons and pions are treated as point particles on a lattice. This allows us to probe larger volumes, lower temperatures, and greater nuclear densities than in lattice QCD. The low-energy interactions of these particles are governed by chiral effective theory, and operator coefficients are determined by fitting to zero temperature few-body scattering data. The leading dependence on the lattice spacing can be understood from the renormalization group and absorbed by renormalizing operator coefficients. In this way, we have a realistic simulation of many-body nuclear phenomena with no free parameters, a systematic expansion, and a clear theoretical connection to QCD. We present results for hot neutron matter at temperatures $20--40\phantom{\rule{0.3em}{0ex}}\mathrm{MeV}$ and densities below twice the nuclear matter density.