Thermal properties of low-density neutron matter are investigated by determinantal quantum Monte Carlo lattice calculations on 3+1 dimensional cubic lattices. Nuclear effective field theory (EFT) is applied using the pionless single- and two-parameter neutron-neutron interactions, determined from the
1S0 scattering length and effective range. The determination of the interactions and the calculations of neutron matter are carried out consistently by applying EFT power counting rules. The thermodynamic limit is taken by the method of finite-size scaling, and the continuum limit is examined in the vanishing lattice filling limit. The
1S0 pairing gap at $T\ensuremath{\approx}0$ is computed directly from the off-diagonal long-range order of the spin pair-pair correlation function and is found to be approximately 30% smaller than BCS calculations with the conventional nucleon-nucleon potentials. The critical temperature
Tc of the normal-to-superfluid phase transition and the pairing temperature scale
T∗ are determined, and the temperature-density phase diagram is constructed. The physics of low-density neutron matter is clearly identified as being a BCS-Bose-Einstein condensation crossover.
Various quantities of an attractively interacting fermion system at the unitary limit are determined by extrapolating Monte Carlo results of low-density neutron matter. Smooth extrapolation in terms of
1/(kFa0) (
kF is the Fermi momentum, and
a0 is the
1S0 scattering length) is found with the quantities examined: the ground-state energy, the pairing gap at $T\ensuremath{\approx}0$, and the critical temperature of the normal-to-superfluid phase transition. We emphasize proximity of the physics of low-density neutron matter to that at the unitary limit. The extrapolated quantities are in a reasonable agreement with those in the literature.