Emergence of nuclear saturation within $\Delta$--full chiral effective field theory

Abstract

Nuclear saturation is a key property of low-energy nuclear physics that depends on fine details of the nuclear interaction. Here we develop a unified statistical framework that uses realistic nuclear forces to link the theoretical modeling of finite nuclei and infinite nuclear matter. We construct fast and accurate emulators for nuclear-matter observables and employ an iterative history-matching approach to explore and reduce the enormous parameter domain of $\Delta$-full chiral interactions. We find that model calibration including \nuc{16}{O} observables gives saturation predictions that are more accurate and have a smaller variance than those that only use few-body data.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, Supplemental Material provided as ancillary materia