Microscopic calculations and energy expansions for neutron-rich matter

Understand

We investigate asymmetric nuclear matter with two- and three-nucleon interactions based on chiral effective field theory, where three-body forces are fit only to light nuclei.

• Focusing on neutron-rich matter, we calculate the energy for different proton fractions and include estimates of the theoretical uncertainty.
• We use our ab-initio results to test the quadratic expansion around symmetric matter with the symmetry energy term, and confirm its validity for highly asymmetric systems.
• Our calculations are in remarkable agreement with an empirical parametrization for the energy density.