Scott Bogner, Michigan State University
Scale dependence of deuteron electrodisintegration
Argonne Physics Division Seminar - 3:30 PM, 27 Mar 2017
Building 203, Conference Room R-150

Ab-initio calculations of medium-mass nuclei have undergone explosive growth in recent years, thanks in part to powerful renormalization group (RG) methods that accelerate convergence by transforming nuclear Hamiltonians to softer forms. There is a widely held folklore that the simple low-momentum wave functions that facilitate microscopic structure calculations inevitably lead to complicated reaction calculations (and interpretations) due to the need to consistently transform the relevant transition operators to more complicated forms. One might expect these complications to be especially severe for operators that probe the high-momentum/short-distance structure of nuclear wave functions. Using deuteron electrodisintegration as a simple testbed for nucleon knock-out processes, we study how structure and reaction components (and the resulting physical picture) are modified under RG evolution. Using simple decoupling arguments, we show the evolved transition operator approximately takes the form of a two-body contact interaction. In contrast to naive expectations, we find that the RG perspective gives a particularly simple explanation for the high-momentum factorization of experimental observables and scaling behavior.

Argonne Physics Division Seminar Schedule