Nuclear-matter saturation and symmetry energy within $\Delta$--full chiral effective field theory

Abstract

Nuclear saturation and the symmetry energy are key properties of low-energy nuclear physics that depend on fine details of the nuclear interaction. The equation-of-state around saturation is also an important anchor for extrapolations to higher densities and studies of neutron stars. 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 perform rigorous uncertainty quantification and find that model calibration including \nuc{16}{O} observables gives saturation predictions that are more precise than those that only use few-body data.