Clustering of Four-Component Unitary Fermions.

Ab initio nuclear physics tackles the problem of strongly interacting four-component fermions. The same setting could foreseeably be probed experimentally in ultracold atomic systems, where two- and three-component experiments have led to major breakthroughs in recent years. Both due to the problem's inherent interest and as a pathway to nuclear physics, in this Letter we study four-component fermions at unitarity via the use of quantum Monte Carlo methods. We explore novel forms of the trial wave function and find one which leads to a ground state of the eight-particle system whose energy is almost equal to that of two four-particle systems. We investigate the clustering properties involved and also extrapolate to the zero-range limit. In addition to being experimentally testable, our results impact the prospects of developing nuclear physics as a perturbation around the unitary limit.

Baryon-Number Violation by Two Units and the Deuteron Lifetime.

We calculate the lifetime of the deuteron with dimension-nine quark operators that violate baryon number by two units. We construct an effective field theory for |ΔB|=2 interactions that give rise to neutron-antineutron (n-n[over ¯]) oscillations and dinucleon decay within a consistent power counting. We calculate the ratio of the deuteron lifetime to the square of the n-n[over ¯] oscillation time up to next-to-leading order. Our result, which is analytical and has a quantified uncertainty, is smaller by a factor ≃2.5 than earlier estimates based on nuclear models, which impacts the indirect bound on the n-n[over ¯] oscillation time and future experiments. We discuss how combined measurements of n-n[over ¯] oscillations and deuteron decay can help to identify the sources of baryon-number violation.

Four-Body Scale in Universal Few-Boson Systems.

The role of an intrinsic four-body scale in universal few-boson systems is the subject of active debate. We study these systems within the framework of effective field theory. For systems of up to six bosons we establish that no four-body scale appears at leading order (LO). However, we find that at next-to-leading order (NLO) a four-body force is needed to obtain renormalized results for binding energies. With the associated parameter fixed to the binding energy of the four-boson system, this force is shown to renormalize the five- and six-body systems as well. We present an original ansatz for the short-distance limit of the bosonic A-body wave function from which we conjecture that new A-body scales appear at N^{A-3} LO. As a specific example, calculations are presented for clusters of helium atoms. Our results apply more generally to other few-body systems governed by a large scattering length, such as light nuclei and halo states, the low-energy properties of which are independent of the detailed internal structure of the constituents.

Ground-State Properties of Unitary Bosons: From Clusters to Matter.

The properties of cold Bose gases at unitarity have been extensively investigated in the last few years both theoretically and experimentally. In this Letter we use a family of interactions tuned to two-body unitarity and very weak three-body binding to demonstrate the universal properties of both clusters and matter. We determine the universal properties of finite clusters up to 60 particles and, for the first time, explicitly demonstrate the saturation of energy and density with particle number and compare with bulk properties. At saturation in the bulk we determine the energy, density, two- and three-body contacts, and the condensate fraction. We find that uniform matter is more bound than three-body clusters by nearly 2 orders of magnitude, the two-body contact is very large in absolute terms, and yet the condensate fraction is also very large, greater than 90%. Equilibrium properties of these systems may be experimentally accessible through rapid quenching of weakly interacting boson superfluids.

Nuclear Physics Around the Unitarity Limit.

We argue that many features of the structure of nuclei emerge from a strictly perturbative expansion around the unitarity limit, where the two-nucleon S waves have bound states at zero energy. In this limit, the gross features of states in the nuclear chart are correlated to only one dimensionful parameter, which is related to the breaking of scale invariance to a discrete scaling symmetry and set by the triton binding energy. Observables are moved to their physical values by small perturbative corrections, much like in descriptions of the fine structure of atomic spectra. We provide evidence in favor of the conjecture that light, and possibly heavier, nuclei are bound weakly enough to be insensitive to the details of the interactions but strongly enough to be insensitive to the exact size of the two-nucleon system.

Effective field theory for lattice nuclei.

We show how nuclear effective field theory (EFT) and ab initio nuclear-structure methods can turn input from lattice quantum chromodynamics (LQCD) into predictions for the properties of nuclei. We argue that pionless EFT is the appropriate theory to describe the light nuclei obtained in LQCD simulations carried out at pion masses heavier than the physical pion mass. We solve the EFT using the effective-interaction hyperspherical harmonics and auxiliary-field diffusion Monte Carlo methods. Fitting the three leading-order EFT parameters to the deuteron, dineutron, and triton LQCD energies at m_{π}≈800 MeV, we reproduce the corresponding alpha-particle binding and predict the binding energies of mass-5 and mass-6 ground states.

P and T violating form factors of the deuteron.

We calculate the electric-dipole and magnetic-quadrupole form factors of the deuteron that arise as a low-energy manifestation of parity and time-reversal violation in quark-gluon interactions. We consider the QCD vacuum angle and the dimension-six operators that originate from physics beyond the standard model: the quark electric and chromoelectric dipole moments and the gluon chromoelectric dipole moment. Within the framework of two-flavor chiral perturbation theory, we show that in combination with the nucleon electric dipole moment, the deuteron moments would allow an identification of the dominant source(s) of symmetry violation.

Observation of the charge symmetry breaking d+d-->4He+pi(0) reaction near threshold.

We report the first observation of the charge symmetry breaking d+d-->4He+pi(0) reaction near threshold. Measurements using a magnetic channel (gated by two photons) of the 4He scattering angle and momentum (from time of flight) permitted reconstruction of the pi(0) "missing mass," the quantity used to separate 4He+pi(0) events from the continuum of double radiative capture 4He+gamma+gamma events. We measured total cross sections for neutral pion production of 12.7+/-2.2 pb at 228.5 MeV and 15.1+/-3.1 pb at 231.8 MeV. The uncertainty is dominated by statistical errors. These cross sections arise fundamentally from the down-up quark mass difference and quark electromagnetic effects that contribute in part through meson mixing (e.g., pi(0)-eta) mechanisms.