A variational study of two-nucleon systems with lattice QCD

Understand

The low-energy spectrum and scattering of two-nucleon systems are studied with lattice quantum chromodynamics using a variational approach.

• A wide range of interpolating operators are used: dibaryon operators built from products of plane-wave nucleons, hexaquark operators built from six localized quarks, and quasi-local operators inspired by two-nucleon bound-state wavefunctions in low-energy effective theories.
• Sparsening techniques are used to compute the timeslice-to-all quark propagators required to form correlation-function matrices using products of these operators.
• Projection of these matrices onto irreducible representations of the cubic group, including spin-orbit coupling, is detailed.