Dilute neutron matter on the lattice at next-to-leading order in chiral effective field theory

Abstract

We discuss lattice simulations of the ground state of dilute neutron matter at next-to-leading order in chiral effective field theory. In a previous paper the coefficients of the next-to-leading-order lattice action were determined by matching nucleon-nucleon scattering data for momenta up to the pion mass. Here the same lattice action is used to simulate the ground state of up to 12 neutrons in a periodic cube using Monte Carlo. We explore the density range from 2% to 8% of normal nuclear density and analyze the ground state energy as an expansion about the unitarity limit with corrections due to finite scattering length, effective range, and P-wave interactions.