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Thomas Papenbrock

Publications and source records attributed to Thomas Papenbrock.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Absence of a shell closure in $^{140}$Sn

There are conflicting theoretical results about the presence of a shell closure in the neutron-rich nucleus $^{140}$Sn. We address this controversy by performing ab initio computations, using a nuclear interaction from chiral effective field theory that accurately reproduced and predicted low-lying states in doubly magic nuclei. We verify that this interaction accurately reproduces low-lying states in $^{133}$Sn. We assume that $^{140}$Sn exhibits a closed $7/2^-$ neutron subshell beyond $^{132}$Sn and compute its first excited $2^+$ state. The resulting energy is small and this contradicts the assumption.

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Saturation of Nuclear Binding from Lattice Hamiltonians

There is a conundrum regarding the binding of $\alpha$ particles in nuclei. On one hand, auxiliary-field Monte Carlo simulations of Hamiltonians on discrete spatial lattices proposed that attractive two-nucleon potentials, alone or together with attractive three-nucleon potentials, yield accurate nuclear binding. On the other hand, such Hamiltonians typically overbind all but the lightest nuclei in continuum-space approaches. We address this puzzle by performing Hartree-Fock computations of the light nuclei $^4$He, $^8$Be, $^{12}$C, and $^{16}$O, and of nuclear and neutron matter using established lattice Hamiltonians. These variational upper bounds for the ground-state energies show that the Hamiltonians with only two-nucleon potentials do not yield accurate binding, in contrast to the results from auxiliary-field Monte Carlo simulations. The case is different for Hamiltonians with three-nucleon potentials although it is the dense packing on the lattice -- and not repulsive potentials -- that yield a constant binding energy per nucleon.

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Dynamics of density fluctuations in atomic nuclei

We study the spatiotemporal patterns of density fluctuations in $^{16,24}$O and $^{48}$Ca using nuclear interactions from chiral effective field theory and the time-dependent coupled-cluster method. We find that two-particle-two-hole excitations generate small-amplitude fluctuations that are fast, short-ranged and of stochastic character.

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Exactness of the normal-ordered two-body truncation of three-nucleon forces

Reference-state-based many-body methods start from Hamiltonians that are normal ordered with respect to the reference state. In low-energy nuclear physics applications normal-ordered Hamiltonians consisting of two- and three-nucleon forces are usually truncated at the two-body rank with residual three-nucleon operators being discarded. Benchmark computations have shown that this truncation is accurate, but we lack an understanding about why it works. We show that the normal-ordered two-body truncation is exact for zero-range three-body forces when nuclei are computed using the coupled cluster with singles and doubles method. As the nuclear three-nucleon force is short ranged and a three-body contact is a leading term in effective field theories of quantum chromodynamics, our result provides an analytical basis for the popular normal-ordered two-body approximation.

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Computing nuclear response functions with time-dependent coupled-cluster theory

We compute nuclear response functions by solving the time-dependent A-body Schr\"odinger equation, recording the time-dependent transition moment and extracting spectral information via Fourier transforms. The solution of the time-dependent many-body problem accounts for correlations on top of the mean field by taking advantage of a time-dependent formulation of coupled-cluster theory. As a validation, we focus on electric dipole transitions in $^4$He and $^{16}$O and compare moments of the response function distribution to the results of an equivalent static framework, finding negligible discrepancies. We investigate how proton and neutron densities evolve in time, and we see the traditional picture of soft and giant dipole resonances as collective oscillations of protons and neutrons emerging from our calculations in $^{16}$O and $^{24}$O. This method also allows us to investigate the behavior of the nucleus in the presence of a strong electric field. In that regime, the behavior of the system becomes chaotic. Qualitatively, the spectral information obtained in this limit is in line with previous time-dependent mean-field results.

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Structure of the doubly magic nuclei $^{208}$Pb and $^{266}$Pb from ab initio computations

Theoretical studies indicate that the superheavy neutron-rich nucleus $^{266}_{\ 82}$Pb$_{184}$ is doubly magic and at the neutron drip line. While its density distributions and single-particle energies have been computed, the structure of this nucleus is yet unknown. We perform ab initio computations of $^{266}$Pb using an interaction from an effective field theory of quantum chromodynamics tuned only on properties of nuclei with $A \leq 4$. We validate our theoretical framework by computing the first $2^+$ and $3^-$ excited states of $^{208}$Pb, finding agreement with experimental data. We confirm that $^{266}$Pb is doubly magic and show that its $3^-$ state, located below the $2^+$ state, exhibits an excitation gap of 2.6 MeV with respect to the ground state. Our calculations also suggest that this nucleus is at the neutron drip line.

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Toward scalable quantum computations of atomic nuclei

We solve the nuclear two-body and three-body bound states via quantum simulations of pionless effective field theory on a lattice in position space. While the employed lattice remains small, the usage of local Hamiltonians including two- and three-body forces ensures that the number of Pauli terms scales linearly with increasing numbers of lattice sites. We use an adaptive ansatz grown from unitary coupled cluster theory to parametrize the ground states of the deuteron and $^3$He, compute their corresponding energies, and analyze the scaling of the required computational resources. Our quantum simulations reproduce exact benchmarks for $^2$H and $^3$He within 100 keV, requiring at most 30 layers in the ansatz and thus resulting in modest circuit depths. Additionally, we find the number of shots required to reach a given precision scales linearly in the lattice size and more mildly in the system size. Based on the agreement with exact benchmarks and mild scaling, we conclude that this can be an efficient, scalable approach for quantum computations of nuclear ground states, particularly to prepare initial states for quantum phase estimation or other filtering algorithms.

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Scattering phase shifts from a quantum computer

We calculate two-body scattering phase shifts on a quantum computer using a leading order short-range effective field theory Hamiltonian. The algorithm combines the variational quantum eigensolver and the quantum subspace expansion. As an example, we consider scattering in the deuteron $^3$S$_1$ partial wave. We calculate scattering phase shifts with a quantum simulator and on real hardware. We also study how noise impacts these calculations and discuss noise mitigation required to extend our work to larger quantum processing units. With current hardware, up to five superconducting qubits can produce acceptable results, and larger calculations will require a significant noise reduction.

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Surprising charge-radius kink in the Sc isotopes at N=20

Charge radii of neutron deficient 40Sc and 41Sc nuclei were determined using collinear laser spectroscopy. With the new data, the chain of Sc charge radii extends below the neutron magic number N=20 and shows a pronounced kink, generally taken as a signature of a shell closure, but one notably absent in the neighboring Ca, K and Ar isotopic chains. Theoretical models that explain the trend at N=20 for the Ca isotopes cannot reproduce this puzzling behavior.

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Quantum computing of the $^6$Li nucleus via ordered unitary coupled clusters

The variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) is an algorithm to compute ground and excited state energy of quantum many-body systems. A key component of the algorithm and an active research area is the construction of a parametrized trial wavefunction -- a so called variational ansatz. The wavefunction parametrization should be expressive enough, i.e. represent the true eigenstate of a quantum system for some choice of parameter values. On the other hand, it should be trainable, i.e. the number of parameters should not grow exponentially with the size of the system. Here, we apply VQE to the problem of finding ground and excited state energies of the odd-odd nucleus $^6$Li. We study the effects of ordering fermionic excitation operators in the unitary coupled clusters ansatz on the VQE algorithm convergence by using only operators preserving the $J_z$ quantum number. The accuracy is improved by two order of magnitude in the case of descending order. We first compute optimal ansatz parameter values using a classical state-vector simulator with arbitrary measurement accuracy and then use those values to evaluate energy eigenstates of $^6$Li on a superconducting quantum chip from IBM. We post-process the results by using error mitigation techniques and are able to reproduce the exact energy with an error of 3.8% and 0.1% for the ground state and for the first excited state of $^6$Li, respectively.

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Ab initio predictions link the neutron skin of ${}^{208}$Pb to nuclear forces

Heavy atomic nuclei have an excess of neutrons over protons, which leads to the formation of a neutron skin whose thickness is sensitive to details of the nuclear force. This links atomic nuclei to properties of neutron stars, thereby relating objects that differ in size by orders of magnitude. The nucleus ${}^{208}$Pb is of particular interest because it exhibits a simple structure and is experimentally accessible. However, computing such a heavy nucleus has been out of reach for ab initio theory. By combining advances in quantum many-body methods, statistical tools, and emulator technology, we make quantitative predictions for the properties of ${}^{208}$Pb starting from nuclear forces that are consistent with symmetries of low-energy quantum chromodynamics. We explore $10^9$ different nuclear-force parameterisations via history matching, confront them with data in select light nuclei, and arrive at an importance-weighted ensemble of interactions. We accurately reproduce bulk properties of ${}^{208}$Pb and determine the neutron skin thickness, which is smaller and more precise than a recent extraction from parity-violating electron scattering but in agreement with other experimental probes. This work demonstrates how realistic two- and three-nucleon forces act in a heavy nucleus and allows us to make quantitative predictions across the nuclear landscape.

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Universal trend of charge radii of even-even Ca-Zn nuclei

Radii of nuclear charge distributions carry information about the strong and electromagnetic forces acting inside the atomic nucleus. While the global behavior of nuclear charge radii is governed by the bulk properties of nuclear matter, their local trends are affected by quantum motion of proton and neutron nuclear constituents. The measured differential charge radii $δ\langle r^2_c\rangle$ between neutron numbers $N=28$ and $N=40$ exhibit a universal pattern as a function of $n=N-28$ that is independent of the atomic number. Here we analyze this remarkable behavior in even-even nuclei from calcium to zinc using two state-of-the-art theories based on quantified nuclear interactions: the ab-initio coupled cluster theory and nuclear density functional theory. Both theories reproduce the smooth rise of differential charge radii and their weak dependence on the atomic number. By considering a large set of isotopic chains, we show that this trend can be captured by just two parameters: the slope and curvature of ${δ\langle r^2_c\rangle(n)}$. We demonstrate that these parameters show appreciable model dependence, and the statistical analysis indicates that they are not correlated with any single model property, i.e., they are impacted by both bulk nuclear properties as well as shell structure.

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Preparation of excited states for nuclear dynamics on a quantum computer

We study two different methods to prepare excited states on a quantum computer, a key initial step to study dynamics within linear response theory. The first method uses unitary evolution for a short time $T=\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{1-F})$ to approximate the action of an excitation operator $\hat{O}$ with fidelity $F$ and success probability $P\approx1-F$. The second method probabilistically applies the excitation operator using the Linear Combination of Unitaries (LCU) algorithm. We benchmark these techniques on emulated and real quantum devices, using a toy model for thermal neutron-proton capture. Despite its larger memory footprint, the LCU-based method is efficient even on current generation noisy devices and can be implemented at a lower gate cost than a naive analysis would suggest. These findings show that quantum techniques designed to achieve good asymptotic scaling on fault tolerant quantum devices might also provide practical benefits on devices with limited connectivity and gate fidelity.

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Simulations of Subatomic Many-Body Physics on a Quantum Frequency Processor

Simulating complex many-body quantum phenomena is a major scientific impetus behind the development of quantum computing, and a range of technologies are being explored to address such systems. We present the results of the largest photonics-based simulation to date, applied in the context of subatomic physics. Using an all-optical quantum frequency processor, the ground-state energies of light nuclei including the triton ($^3$H), $^{3}$He, and the alpha particle ($^{4}$He) are computed. Complementing these calculations and utilizing a 68-dimensional Hilbert space, our photonic simulator is used to perform sub-nucleon calculations of the two-body and three-body forces between heavy mesons in the Schwinger model. This work is a first step in simulating subatomic many-body physics on quantum frequency processors---augmenting classical computations that bridge scales from quarks to nuclei.

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Computing the dipole polarizability of 48Ca with increased precision

We compute the electric dipole polarizability of 48Ca with an increased precision by including more correlations than in previous studies. Employing the coupled-cluster method we go beyond singles and doubles excitations and include leading-order three-particle-three-hole (3p-3h) excitations for the ground state, excited states, and the similarity transformed operator. We study electromagnetic sum rules, such as the bremsstrahlung sum rule m_0 and the polarizability sum rule alpha_D using interactions from chiral effective field theory. To gauge the quality of our coupled-cluster approximations we perform several benchmarks with the effective interaction hyperspherical harmonics approach in 4He and with self consistent Green's function in 16O. We compute the dipole polarizability of 48Ca employing the chiral interaction N2LOsat [Ekstroem et al., Phys. Rev. C 91, 051301 (2015)] and the 1.8/2.0 (EM) [Hebeler et al., Phys. Rev. C 83, 031301 (2011)]. We find that the effect of 3p-3h excitations in the ground state is small for 1.8/2.0 (EM) but non-negligible for N2LOsat. The addition of these new correlations allows us to improve the precision of our 48Ca calculations and reconcile the recently reported discrepancy between coupled-cluster results based on these interactions and the experimentally determined alpha_D from proton inelastic scattering in 48Ca [Birkhan et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 252501 (2017)]. For the computation of electromagnetic and polarizability sum rules, the inclusion of leading-order 3p-3h excitations in the ground state is important, while less so for the excited states and the similarity-transformed dipole operator.

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Electric dipole polarizability: from few- to many-body systems

We review the Lorentz integral transform coupled-cluster method for the calculation of the electric dipole polarizability. We benchmark our results with exact hyperspherical harmonics calculations for 4He and then we move to a heavier nucleus studying 16O. We observe that the implemented chiral nucleon-nucleon interaction at next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order underestimates the electric dipole polarizability.

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First principles description of the giant dipole resonance in 16O

We present an ab-initio calculation of the giant dipole resonance in 16O based on a nucleon-nucleon (NN) interaction from chiral effective field theory that reproduces NN scattering data with high accuracy. By merging the Lorentz integral transform and the coupled-cluster methods, we extend the previous theoretical limits for break-up observables in light nuclei with mass numbers (A<=7), and address the collective giant dipole resonance of 16O. We successfully benchmark the new approach against virtually exact results from the hyper-spherical harmonics method in 4He. Our results for 16O reproduce the position and the total strength (bremsstrahlung sum rule) of the dipole response very well. When compared to the cross section from photo-absorption experiments the theoretical curve exhibits a smeared form of the peak. The tail region between 40 and 100 MeV is reproduced within uncertainties.

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