Recent advances in chiral EFT based nuclear forces and their applications

Understand

During the past two decades, chiral effective field theory has evolved into a powerful tool to derive nuclear forces from first principles.

• Nearly all two-nucleon interactions have been worked out up to sixth order of chiral perturbation theory, while, with few exceptions, three-nucleon forces, which play a subtle, but crucial role in microscopic nuclear structure calculations, have been derived up to fifth order.
• We review the current status of these forces as well as their applications in nuclear many-body systems.
• While the ab initio description of light nuclei is generally very successful, we point out and analyze problems encountered with medium-mass nuclei.