Towards a Nuclear Mass Model Rooted in Chiral Effective Field Theory

Nuclear mass models have a long history. They come in many flavors, ranging from those based on macroscopic phenomenology to those based on microscopic mean field treatments. The most sophisticated of these have root-mean-square deviations lower than 0.5 MeV. However, apart from a few exceptions (e.g. the density functionals by Navarro Perez et al., arXiv:1801.08615 and by Zurek et al., arXiv:2307.13568), they are lacking a direct connection to quantum chromodynamics.

We start with a Hamiltonian from chiral effective field theory at next-to-next-to leading order and readjust its low-energy coefficients such that (symmetry breaking) Hartree-Fock computations yield binding energies. To make computationally viable the task of minimizing the root-mean-square deviation between the Hartree-Fock and experimental binding energies, we make use of model order reduction and construct Hartree-Fock emulators. This short talk presents the first results of this project.