Understanding the Effect of Chiral NN Parametrization on Nuclear Shapes From an Ab Initio Perspective

¹ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA
² Department of Physics, Chalmers Institute of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden
³ Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA
⁴ Nuclear Physics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, 250 68 Rež, Czech Republic
⁵ Department of Computer Systems, Faculty of Information Technology, Czech Technical University in Prague, Prague 16000, Czech Republic

^* e-mail: kbeck13@lsu.edu

Published online: 25 June 2025

Abstract

The ab initio symmetry-adapted no-core shell model naturally describes nuclear deformation and collectivity, and is therefore well-suited to studying the dynamics and coexistence of shapes in atomic nuclei. For the first time, we analyze how these features in low-lying states of ⁶Li and ¹²C are impacted by the underlying realistic nucleon-nucleon interaction. We find that the interaction parametrization has a notable but limited effect on collective shapes in the lowest ⁶Li and ¹²C states, while collective structures in the excited 2⁺ state of ¹²C are significantly more sensitive to the interaction parameters and exhibits emergent shape coexistence.