Uncertainty quantification and falsification of chiral nuclear potentials

Abstract

Are chiral theories at present describing experimental NN scattering data satisfactorily? Will the chiral approach offer a framework where fitting and selecting the existing np and pp data can be done without theoretical bias? While predictive power in theoretical nuclear physics has been a major concern in the study of nuclear structure and reactions, the Effective Field Theory (EFT) based on chiral expansions has emerged after Weinberg as a model-independent hierarchy for many-body forces and much progress has been achieved over the last decades. We review some of the issues involved which point to being close to the solution, but also that work remains still to be done to validate the theory. We analyze several examples including zero energy NN scattering and perturbative counter-term-free peripheral scattering where one would expect these methods to work best and unveil relevant systematic discrepancies when a fair comparison to the Granada-2013 NN-database and partial wave analysis based on coarse graining the interaction is undertaken.