TY  - JOUR
AU  - Elhatisari, Serdar
AU  - Li, Ning
AU  - Rokash, Alexander
AU  - Alarcón, Jose Manuel
AU  - Du, Dechuan
AU  - Klein, Nico
AU  - Lu, Bing-nan
AU  - Meißner, Ulf-G.
AU  - Epelbaum, Evgeny
AU  - Krebs, Hermann
AU  - Lähde, Timo A.
AU  - Lee, Dean
AU  - Rupak, Gautam
TI  - Nuclear Binding Near a Quantum Phase Transition
JO  - Physical review letters
VL  - 117
IS  - 13
SN  - 1079-7114
CY  - College Park, Md.
PB  - APS
M1  - FZJ-2017-00454
SP  - 132501
PY  - 2016
N1  - Published version to appear in Physical Review Letters. Main: 5   pages, 3 figures. Supplemental material: 13 pages, 6 figures
AB  - How do protons and neutrons bind to form nuclei? This is the central question of ab initio nuclear structure theory. While the answer may seem as simple as the fact that nuclear forces are attractive, the full story is more complex and interesting. In this work we present numerical evidence from ab initio lattice simulations showing that nature is near a quantum phase transition, a zero-temperature transition driven by quantum fluctuations. Using lattice effective field theory, we perform Monte Carlo simulations for systems with up to twenty nucleons. For even and equal numbers of protons and neutrons, we discover a first-order transition at zero temperature from a Bose-condensed gas of alpha particles (4He nuclei) to a nuclear liquid. Whether one has an alpha-particle gas or nuclear liquid is determined by the strength of the alpha-alpha interactions, and we show that the alpha-alpha interactions depend on the strength and locality of the nucleon-nucleon interactions. This insight should be useful in improving calculations of nuclear structure and important astrophysical reactions involving alpha capture on nuclei. Our findings also provide a tool to probe the structure of alpha cluster states such as the Hoyle state responsible for the production of carbon in red giant stars and point to a connection between nuclear states and the universal physics of bosons at large scattering length.
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
UR  - <Go to ISI:>//WOS:000383848500001
C6  - pmid:27715077
DO  - DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.132501
UR  - https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/826208
ER  -