Quantum Monte Carlo calculations of symmetric nuclear matter

We present an accurate numerical study of the equation of state of nuclear matter based on realistic nucleon--nucleon interactions by means of Auxiliary Field Diffusion Monte Carlo (AFDMC) calculations. The AFDMC method samples the spin and isospin degrees of freedom allowing for quantum simulations of large nucleonic systems and can provide quantitative understanding of problems in nuclear structure and astrophysics.Comment: Final version published in the Phys. Rev. Let

Path Integral Quantum Monte Carlo Calculations of Light Nuclei

We describe a path-integral ground-state quantum Monte Carlo method for light nuclei in continuous space. We show how to efficiently update and sample the paths with spin-isospin dependent and spin-orbit interactions. We apply the method to the triton and alpha particle using both local chiral interactions with next-to-next-to-leading-order %(N$^2$LO) and the Argonne interactions. For operators, like the total energy, that commute with the Hamiltonian, our results agree with Green's function Monte Carlo and auxiliary field diffusion Monte Carlo calculations. For operators that do not commute with the Hamiltonian and for Euclidean response functions, the path-integral formulation allows straightforward calculation without forward walking or the increased variance typical of diffusion methods. We demonstrate this by calculating density distributions, root mean square radii, and Euclidean response functions for single-nucleon couplings.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures, 6 tables. Accepted by Physical Review C on 2022-9-28; published on 2022-10-2

Structure, rotational dynamics, and superfluidity of small OCS-doped He clusters

The structural and dynamical properties of OCS molecules solvated in Helium clusters are studied using reptation quantum Monte Carlo, for cluster sizes n=3-20 He atoms. Computer simulations allow us to establish a relation between the rotational spectrum of the solvated molecule and the structure of the He solvent, and of both with the onset of superfluidity. Our results agree with a recent spectroscopic study of this system, and provide a more complex and detailed microscopic picture of this system than inferred from experiments.Comment: 4 pages. TeX (requires revtex4) + 3 ps figures (1 color

Second-Order Perturbation Theory in Continuum Quantum Monte Carlo Calculations

We report on the first results for the second-order perturbation theory correction to the ground-state energy of a nuclear many-body system in a continuum quantum Monte Carlo calculation. Second-order (and higher) perturbative corrections are notoriously difficult to compute in most \textit{ab~initio} many-body methods, where the focus is usually on obtaining the ground-state energy. By mapping our calculation of the second-order energy correction to an evolution in imaginary time using the diffusion Monte Carlo method, we are able to calculate these corrections for the first time. After benchmarking our method in the few-body sector, we explore the effect of charge-independence breaking terms in the nuclear Hamiltonian. We then employ the new approach to investigate the many-body, perturbative, order-by-order convergence that is fundamental in modern theories of the nucleon-nucleon interaction derived from chiral effective field theory. Our approach is quite general and promises to be of wide applicability.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl