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arXiv:nucl-th/0208066 · Physical Review C

Off-shell effects and consistency of many-body treatments of dense matter

Boris Krippa, Michael C. Birse, Judith A. McGovern, Niels R. Walet

Published Mar 21, 2003• 18 citations
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Abstract

Effective field theory requires all observables to be independent of the representation used for the quantum field operators. It means that off-shell properties of the interactions should not lead to any observable effects. We analyze this issue in the context of many-body approaches to nuclear matter, where it should be possible to shift the contributions of lowest order in purely off-shell two-body interactions into three-body forces. We show that none of the commonly used truncations of the two-body scattering amplitude such as the ladder, Brueckner-Hartree-Fock, or parquet approximations respect this requirement.

DOI
10.1103/physrevc.67.031301

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Effective field theory requires all observables to be independent of the representation used for the quantum field operators. It means that off-shell properties of the interactions should not lead to any observable effects. We analyze this issue in the context of many-body approaches to nuclear matter, where it should be possible to shift the contributions of lowest order in purely off-shell two-body interactions into three-body forces. We show that none of the commonly used truncations of the two-body scattering amplitude such as the ladder, Brueckner-Hartree-Fock, or parquet approximations respect this requirement.
Effective field theory requires all observables to be independent of the representation used for the quantum field operators. Off‐shell parts of the in‐medium vertex functions depend on the partucular representation so that off‐shell properties of the interactions should not lead to any observable effects. We analyse this issue in the context of many‐body approaches to nuclear matter, where it should be possible to shift into three‐body force the contributions from purely off‐shell two‐body interactions. We show that none of the commonly used truncations of the two‐body scattering amplitude such as the ladder, Brueckner‐Hartree‐Fock or parquet approximations respect this requirement.
Conventional many-body quantum theory considers, as a rule, a system of particles in the mean field interacting through two-body forces. Recently it was suggested that in nuclear physics many-body forces, first of all three-body ones, are important for saturation of nuclear matter and for many details of nuclear structure. We consider possible influence of three-body forces, regardless of their origin (bare nucleon interactions or effective medium phenomena), on many-body dynamics. The new effects include, but are not limited to, renormalization of pairing and other two-body forces, enhancement of anharmonicity for collective modes, and special features of shell model calculations.
The solution of the quantum many-body problem for medium-mass nuclei using realistic nuclear interactions poses a superbe challenge for nuclear structure research. Because an exact solution can only be provided for the lightest nuclei, one has to rely on approximate solutions when proceeding to heavier systems. Over the past years, tremendous progress has been made in the development and application of systematically improvable expansion methods and an accurate description of nuclear observables has become viable up to mass number A≈100A \approx 100A≈100. While closed-shell systems are consistently described via a plethora of different many-body methods, the extension to genuine open-shell systems still remains a major challenge and up to now there is no \textit{ab initio} many-body method which applies equally well to systems with even and odd mass numbers. The goal of this thesis is the development and implementation of innovative perturbative approaches with genuine open-shell capabilities. This requires the extension of well-known single-reference approaches to more general vacua. In this work we choose two complementary routes for the usage of generalized reference states. First, we derive a new \emph{ab initio} approach based on multi-configurational reference states that are conveniently derived from a prior no-core shell model calculation. Perturbative corrections are derived via second-order many-body perturbation theory, thus, merging configuration interaction and many-body perturbation theory. The generality of this ansatz enables for a treatment of medium-mass systems with arbitrary mass number, as well as the extension to low-lying excited states such that ground and excited states are treated on an equal footing. In a complementary approach, we use reference states that break a symmetry of the underlying Hamiltonian. In the simplest case this corresponds to the expansion around a particle-number-broken Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov vacuum which is obtained from a mean-field calculation. Pairing correlations are already absorbed in the reference state. The mild scaling allows for investigations up to tin isotopic chains. All benchmarks were performed using state-of-the-art chiral two- plus three-nucleon interactions thus allowing for a universal description of nuclear observables in the medium-mass regime.
Reference-state-based many-body methods start from Hamiltonians that are normal ordered with respect to the reference state. In low-energy nuclear physics applications, normal-ordered Hamiltonians consisting of two- and three-nucleon forces are usually truncated at the two-body rank with residual three-nucleon operators being discarded. Benchmark computations have shown that this truncation is accurate, but we lack an understanding about why it works. We show that the normal-ordered two-body truncation is exact for zero-range three-body forces when nuclei are computed using the coupled cluster with singles and doubles method. As the nuclear three-nucleon force is short ranged and a three-body contact is a leading term in effective field theories of quantum chromodynamics, our result provides an analytical basis for the popular normal-ordered two-body approximation.
I consider nonrelativistic bosons interacting via pairwise potentials with infinite scattering length and supporting no two-body bound states. To lowest order in effective field theory, these conditions lead to noninteracting bosons, since the coupling constant of the Lieb-Liniger model vanishes identically in this limit. Since any realistic pairwise interaction is not a mere delta function, the noninteracting picture is an idealization indicating that the effect of interactions is weaker than in the case of off-resonant potentials. I show that the leading-order correction to the ground-state energy for more than two bosons is accurately described by the lowest-order three-body force in effective field theory that arises due to the off-shell structure of the two-body interaction. For natural two-body interactions with a short-distance repulsive core and an attractive tail, the emergent three-body interaction is repulsive and, therefore, three bosons do not form any bound states. This situation is analogous to the two-dimensional repulsive Bose gas, when treated using the lowest-order contact interaction, where the scattering amplitude exhibits an unphysical Landau pole. The avoidance of this state in the three-boson problem proceeds in a way that parallels the two-dimensional case. These results pave the way for the experimental realization of one-dimensional Bose gases with pure three-body interactions using ultracold atoms.